The KDE community has charted its course for the coming years, focusing on three interconnected paths that converge on a single point: community. These paths aim to improve user experience, support developers, and foster community growth.
The KDE community has charted its course for the coming years, focusing on three interconnected paths that converge on a single point: community. These paths aim to improve user experience, support developers, and foster community growth.
Personally, I have little interest in learning or dealing with C++ solely for the sake of developing KDE applications. I would much rather use Rust.
Imo, restricting the languages that can be used for app development cuts out large swaths of developers who would otherwise be eager to develop software for the project. I'm sure there are some who wouldn't mind picking up C++ for this cause, but I'd wager that they are a minority. Gnome beats out KDE in that regard, imo, as GTK has bindings and documentation for many languages.
The success of KDE depends on maintaining and attracting new developers. C++ is decreasing in popularity, with less people becoming willimg to learn it overtime. Adding more modern languages to the mix that are more pleasant to write with will help keep KDE popular with devs.
I'm very excited, because in the past I have bounced off KDE development. Coming from a java and web background, the tooling and dev environment was just mindboggling.
Let me be more concrete then. What I am used to is the following:
Open the relevant Jetbrains IDE
Click on new project
Find the correct template (e.g. Spring Boot Web Starter) and follow the wizard.
(Alternatively the steps before can be replaced with cloning a repo and opening it with my IDE)
I can click "Play" to start the app
I can click "Debug" to debug the app
Bonus: when doing Android or Web development, I can create the GUI by drag&dropping building blocks into a preview (contrary to manually typing out textfiles that describe the layout)
Every step is a button click or a entry field in a dialog.
These steps also work on every major distro.
And I wish for a similar experience when developing KDE Plasma.
For completeness, I will try to do the same dev things and list the steps for KDE Plasma development later (in about 8h).