lubuntu-desktop team mailing list archive

[PCMan <pcman.tw@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone on this list,
I just passed my license exam yesterday. So that means I will have a little
more free time from now on.
I, however, still have an important presentation this week and I have to
prepare for it.
Since next week, I guess I'll have some time for LXDE development.
It's time to fix some old bugs and adopt some patches.

I'm now thinking about future development.
Since dbus support is now part of glib and nowadays dbus is widely adopted,
maybe it's time to replace our own hand-made IPC with dbus and make use of
dbus more in LXDE.
It's possible to use dbus inside menu-cache and in the session manager.
PCManFM might also use it for IPC and to provide some interfaces to other
applications.

The second issue is the use of C++ in LXDE. Currently we mainly use C and in
the future there might be vala.
Doing programming in pure C is quite inefficient and error-prone on memory
management sometimes.
In C++, things can be better encapsulated if it's used carefully.
There also exists some very high quality libraries, such as boost and some
tools provided by google.
Using C++ inside LXDE only introduces one additional runtime lib,
libstdc++6.so.
So actually I'm considering the possibility of using C++ in PCManFM.
Implement some new features with C++ will be much easier than doing it with
pure C.
With C++, the development can be more rapid and we can utilize many nice
existing libs.
Later, I'll try to use C++ inside PCManFM is feasible and will do some
experiments in git branches.
Of course, the program should be kept as fast as old versions and memory
usage cannot significantly increase.
Otherwise, I won't use it.

Cheers!