On Friday 07 November 2008, Jon Harrop wrote: > I was just perusing SourceForge and stumbled upon a popular software > package classed as being written partly in OCaml called WideStudio: > > http://www.widestudio.org > > This is apparently a cross platform IDE with a GUI toolkit that supports > several languages including OCaml. > > Has anyone heard of or used this?
They use a me-too application framework, which is an achievement in itself -- a lot of work went into it, and it is cross-platform. They do have a "solid" history of source tarball releases, but their CVS repository has been created in 2006 and left untouched since. Perhaps they use internal source control, but that's quite unkosher for such a project. I've downloaded the sources to see how they are. It seems that "mechanical" porting to Qt would delete 30%+ code (tens of thousands of lines), and further refactoring would perhaps slash it all by 50% total. If I were optimistic, given a good design groundwork, a reduction by 2/3rds of the code size would not be unthinkable. The codebase compiles using a C++ compiler and would be typical of a WINAPI or X11-era mindset. It reads like MFC source code, style-wise. I'd imagine it to be a major pain to work with if you're "spoiled" with C++, as opposed to "C/C++", which is neither C nor real C++. Some of their features may be worth replicating, but I wouldn't go near that codebase with a long stick, simply because it has bitrotted in spite of being actively maintained. Their design has bitrotted, that is. I can't of course convince anyone of choosing vaporware (in-progress Camelia) over a project that's obviously maintained and has some userbase ;) The above are just my opinions. Cheers, Kuba _______________________________________________ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
