[Lazarus] GTK 3.0

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Tue, 12 Jul 2016, Juha Manninen wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 12:57 PM, Erwin van den Bosch <erwin at deseine.nl> wrote:
>> I have read enough! Forget GTK3 (and GTK4).
>
> Yes, I also think they plan to break it too often. However I believe
> it makes the API better.
> Honestly, GTK 2 is not a very good API.
> This is about balance between keeping things stable and improving things.
> In Lazarus POW it is irrelevant because the bindings are needed anyway.
>

It is relevant: it costs time, better spent on other things.

>> After 32 years of graphical desktops on Unix we still have no stable widget
>> set! :-(
>
> Xlib API is stable. The other widgetsets are also stable enough.
> Think of it, both Xlib and Win32 APIs have been stable for a long
> time. Which do you prefer:
> 1. Nice modern object oriented API which breaks sometimes to keep it clean.
> 2. Xlib and Win32 stable APIs for eternity.
>
> I choose option number 1.

Then why does Microsoft choose 2 ? 
They could have elected to throw out Win32 when they came with .NET.

Luckily they did not, many companies would be forced to stay with Windows 95
or NT 4 or somesuch if they hadn't.

Stability of your API is of the utmost importance.

As an example:
The web APIs of some of Microsoft's online platforms have changed 3 times in the last 2 years. 
Each is slightly different from the next, and requires you to rework a lot of your code, for little gain. 
People have better things to do than keeping up with changing APIs.

Michael.