Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by audidude 682 days ago
> Yes, that is right, Visual Studio for Mac is a closed source version of the formerly open source MonoDevelop IDE after Microsoft acquired Xamarin.

Having all of my GPL code ripped out of MonoDevelop so it could become Visual Studio for Mac was the straw that made me write GNOME Builder, GNOME's flagship IDE.
4 comments
marcodiego 682 days ago
Oh! So you are Christian Hergert, right?

I've been completely deaf to GNOME dev tools for a few years. What are the plans (if is there any) for a reasonably good RAD or ui builder tool (besides cambalache)? Is there any hope for blueprint + workbench turning into something to fill this gap? Was there any progress or plan on the "designable" interface for GTK?

For the record, I wrote this comment some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35632761

link
audidude 682 days ago
I am.

It's been on my radar for a long time and I have prototypes for one that are bitrotting on gitlab. There are three major design pieces of it.

First, It has an executable that runs in your development container (environment/etc) which means you can load libraries/typelibs/girs/etc just like the app would without crashing the IDE (or Glade in the old days).

Second, everything is an AST node so doing fun manipulations, unlimited undo, etc is just tree mutations.

Third the worker process does the rendering to a render node tree which is then shipped over to the Designer process to render.

The cambalache author and I are friends, so we occasionally talk about how we can make things work to integrate from Builder.

As for blueprint, that is outside of my knowledge area. I still do everything in XML and would prefer a designer to work with trees anyyway. Not sure I'd go the route of mutating a blueprint AST, but I hear it has back-and-fro to XML so that would probably be fine.

Also, if you want to make this a higher priority, lobby my employer (Red Hat) to make sure they know it's important to you.

Secondly, help me with _any_ of my other projects so I have some cycles to dedicate to it. People rarely notice but Builder, Sysprof, Text Editor, D-Spy, Manuals, Ptyxis, etc... are all one-man (split between many) projects and libraries.

link
marcodiego 682 days ago
> I have prototypes for one that are bitrotting on gitlab.

If you are talking about "drafting" I even had a few contributions in 2021. Would love to see it evolve.

link
2143 682 days ago
Tell us about your Audis!
link
audidude 682 days ago
In the profile details
link
xet7 682 days ago
"On August 30, 2023, Microsoft announced that Visual Studio for Mac is in the process of discontinuation, with 17.6 being the last version supported until August 31, 2024"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MonoDevelop#Visual_Studio_for_...

https://killedbymicrosoft.info/

Also, that article about .NET drama is from 2021.

link
9cb14c1ec0 682 days ago
I still miss XamarinStudio (MonoDevelop variant). I pay for JetBrains Rider now because it's the closest thing to my memories of the good ol' days.
link
katzinsky 681 days ago
When I used to work as a freelancer MonoDevelop was awesome since it meant I could work from a decent OS instead of Windows. Thanks so much for your work.
link