[sword-devel] Porting to MS .NET framework

[David's Mailing-list and Spam Receiver]

On Tuesday 06 May 2003 12:18 pm, John T. Gardner Jr. wrote:
> I wish I had the time.  I've been doing C++ but really like C#.  Really
> cuts down the development time, builds really fast (in VS), it is easier to
> maintain strong exception safety guarantees, and performance is great too
> (even graphics, RT not a problem).  We tried Java for here but because we
> write software that displays RT EKG graphics it just couldn't keep up on
> our hardware platform. We had to stick with C++.  C# though gives us the
> performance we need.  My estimate is that you would need half to 1/3 the
> amount of code as C++ to get equivalent functionality.  The .NET libraries
> are quite rich like Java's.

Except C# isn't as portable as C++. The C# linux compilers are still very very 
much in beta and aren't close to fully functional last I checked. And I don't 
know of a mac C# compiler at all. But as it stands the library does quite 
excellently in C++ and is portable to many platforms (including many legacy 
and handheld platforms that are unable to use C# or Java). I would say rather 
than converting the linbrary to C#, or whatever, make bindings for it if the 
language supports that. Or do like the JSword people did and make your own 
branch, but I really don't see many benifits of porting the backend library 
to C#. And there are several disatvangages to doing so, not the least of 
which is the fact that the sword project api is currently the *__ONLY__* 
Biblical reading library for linux in existance, and I really don't want to 
have to boot to windows just to spend some time with Jesus at my computer.

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