High-level languages, large projects, GNOME and the .NET controversy

[Paul Boddie]

Slightly off-topic, but the recent controversy stirred up by Miguel de
Icaza and Richard Stallman on the future of GNOME and its relation to
.NET technologies produced an interesting response:

  http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/02/06/1536255&mode=nocomment

Here's the relevant section:

    [Miguel]

    I have written and maintained many lines of code as part of
    my GNOME work.  Ximian has developed Evolution which consists of
    roughly 750,000 lines of code. 

        Large software projects expose a set of problems that can be
    ignored for smaller projects.  Programs that have long life times
    have different dynamics when it comes to memory management than
    smaller programs.

        There is a point in your life when you realize that you have
    written enough destructors, and have spent enough time tracking
    down a memory leak, and you have spend enough time tracking down
    memory corruption, and you have spent enough time using low-level
    insecure functions, and you have implemented way too many linked
    lists [1]

        [1] indeed, GNOME uses Glib which is a massive step up from
    the Unixy libc APIs.

It occurs to me that there are still many people who choose not to use
languages of a higher level than C/C++ for development, and it would
be interesting to know what their reasons are. Of course, writing a
graphical toolkit *purely* in Python is somewhat ambitious, and there
are clearly performance issues to be considered, but I still can't
understand why people would want to write *entire* applications (of
the nature discussed above) in C/C++ these days.

Can anyone enlighten me? Perhaps I should have cross-posted to
comp.lang.c, or whatever. :-)

Paul