With .NET Core, is there any reason to not just drop IL2CPP completely? (The whole thing only existed in the first place because they are stuck on a completely outdated Mono version, due to Xamarin changing the license of newer Mono versions trying to extract money from Unity.)
il2cpp has advantages other than licensing (Mono is indeed open-source, but it is LGPL so it can only be used on platforms that comply with the LGPL; Unity runs on various non-LGPL platforms). il2cpp combines ease-of-use (C#) for Unity developers with native (C++) performance. What's not to love about that? :-P
Seriously?
The same people who couldn't maintain their fork of Unity are now writing their own home-grown runtime, complete with their own garbage collector.
I don't see a chance of this working out "well" for any sane or bizarre notion of "well".
Having switched to OS X about a year ago after years of Linux usage, I can say that personally I really like the case insensitivity OS X has by default. It doesn't whine every time I accidentally (don't) press caps lock. Case sensitive file systems must be the dumbest invention ever. Who is seriously going to distinguish his/her files by capital and non-capital letters? "Test.txt" and "test.txt" should be the same!
Did you know that upper lower conversion (which a case-insensitive FS must perform) isn't universal and depends on locale?
I'm new to GUI programming and foreign to both Windows and OSX so please forgive my ignorance. In what way are the native GUIs better? Are they faster/more responsive or do they look better? Which would be more work over the e.g. 1,2 and 5 year period maintaining three guis or one? (Or is QT not quite cross platform so one ends up maintaining three inferior versions anyway?)
Qt is cross platform. The difference is that there are UI rendering (say, scaling) behaviors the native toolchains use Qt does not. It comes as close as possible within its widget layout engine it can get away with to native on every platform it supports (which when you consider thats everything from Android to Windows is a feat) but is never a perfect reproduction. Its not something that is going to be "work" for yo…
> But if you want to develop cross platform native looking software... Qt is absolutely it. Only option.
If you want to develop cross platform native looking software, Qt most certainly is not the only option, wxWidgets is. In fact, as you yourself pointed out, Qt isn't really native, just tries to fake the native look and feel. wxWidgets actually is, as it's a thin wrapper around the native toolkits.
I'm scratching my head after this article, not really sure if the author really believes in what he's complaining on fully? For me, those are kinda nice "wishes", in that if they happened, the porting team would have less work to do now, sure. But, actually, especially those specific things listed - they sound to me like things, which would be unnecessarily hard and really costly things to do "in the past", assuming…
Hi! I'm glad to see that the post is promoting constructive dialog about what does or doesn't make portable code, which is what the point actually was (in addition to shedding a bit of light about the state of porting Unity to Linux). I'll clarify a few things: 1. Unity was originally written for Mac OS X, then later ported to Windows (not the other way around). Given that it's more than possible to have a case-sensi…
Thanks for the reply! Most of them make much more sense now. As to 1. and 2., I'd say you could want to consider merging those clarifications into the original article. In 1., arguably some background knowledge of Unity could be expected from the reader, and maybe I'm just not the intended target. But especially in 2., I'm afraid I can't agree that those clarifications are there, just hidden between words. There are very little words in 2. in the article. As to 3.2 & 3.3, I don't really get the clarifications unfortunately; I think it shows even more that I don't really have knowledge of Unity, so I'm starting to think maybe that wasn't really an article for me to start with. Thanks for the interesting and insightful discussion!