Re: [Caml-list] WideStudio

[Kuba Ober <ober.14@osu.edu>]

On Friday 07 November 2008, Jon Harrop wrote:
> I was just perusing SourceForge and stumbled upon a popular software
> package classed as being written partly in OCaml called WideStudio:
>
>   http://www.widestudio.org
>
> This is apparently a cross platform IDE with a GUI toolkit that supports
> several languages including OCaml.
>
> Has anyone heard of or used this?

They use a me-too application framework, which is an achievement in itself --
a lot of work went into it, and it is cross-platform.

They do have a "solid" history of source tarball releases, but their CVS
repository has been created in 2006 and left untouched since. Perhaps they
use internal source control, but that's quite unkosher for such a project.

I've downloaded the sources to see how they are. It seems that "mechanical"
porting to Qt would delete 30%+ code (tens of thousands of lines), and
further refactoring would perhaps slash it all by 50% total. If I were
optimistic, given a good design groundwork, a reduction by 2/3rds of the code
size would not be unthinkable.

The codebase compiles using a C++ compiler and would be typical of a WINAPI or
X11-era mindset. It reads like MFC source code, style-wise. I'd imagine it
to be a major pain to work with if you're "spoiled" with C++, as opposed to
"C/C++", which is neither C nor real C++.

Some of their features may be worth replicating, but I wouldn't go near that
codebase with a long stick, simply because it has bitrotted in spite of being
actively maintained. Their design has bitrotted, that is.

I can't of course convince anyone of choosing vaporware (in-progress Camelia)
over a project that's obviously maintained and has some userbase ;) The above
are just my opinions.

Cheers, Kuba