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<p>Unfortunately this honeymoon phase quickly came to an end. Writing in C requires a <strong>lot</strong> of boilerplate code, and significant use of <strong>macros,</strong> against which I am generally ideologically opposed. For every "class" type that you define in your app, you have to implement several functions: one that initializes the class itself with the runtime, another for handling dynamic setting of properties, another to handle getting those properties, one for initializing instances of that class, and one for destroying or "finalizing" instances of that class. Confusingly there are two different functions for destroying objects, one called <strong>finalize</strong> and another called <strong>dispose,</strong> and I guess this was done to eliminate cycles in the reference counting mechanism implemented by GObject. Big yuck.</p>

<p>I eventually did finish the app I was writing in pure C, but it was a shitload of code. There are probably a couple of memory leaks too. One great thing about writing in C is that compiling the code is basically instantaneous. I actually started to feel angry and upset thinking about how much time we waste compiling code in newer languages. Do people know that complex C programs take only a few seconds to compile? Debugging was excellent too. GDB just works and I can see everything. Overall a pretty good experience I would say.</p>

<h4>C++ (Rating: C-)</h4>

<p>Linux guys are going to hate me for even mentioning C++, but I of course had to give it a try. Despite its numerous flaws, it's still the best bang for your buck when it comes to offering reasonably good object-oriented features with very fast performance.</p>

<p>For using GLib and GTK in C++ I decided to use the <strong>gtkmm</strong> library, which implements a variety of C++ bindings for all of the classes in the toolkit. Along with that I also used glibmm and giomm which are required to use the GLib and GIO dependencies in C++ code.</p>

<p>I was immediately disappointed to learn that a ton of boilerplate was still required just for defining some basic data types with properties. Properties are an important abstraction in GObject that let you bind data to various widgets, so this isn't something that can be easily avoided. Basically for each data member in your class, you need <strong>three accessor functions</strong>: two that 'get' and 'set' the data itself, and a third that returns a reference to the <span class="code">Glib::Property</span> object representing that member.</p>

<p>Another disappointment was the documentation for gtkmm and glibmm. Just atrocious. Looks like autogenerated Doxygen slop. Come on guys, it's not 2008 anymore.</p>

<p>One positive thing I will say about using C++ is that memory management is a lot more tolerable than C. Using the <span class="code">Glib::RefPtr</span> smart pointer class instead of manually managing GObject lifecycles is a blessing.</p>

<p>I did end up finishing this project as well and the end result was satisfactory. Overall I didn't really have a lot of fun writing C++, but then again, who does.</p>

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