5 Mai

I have been programming for over 10 years professionally, and even longer if you count the years of hacking before that. However, all my experience comes from the Microsoft / Windows world of languages. I regularly use C# for most of my *real* programming jobs. However, I have dabbled in C, C++, Pascal, Basic, Perl, and a few others.

If I am going to pull this project off successfully, I need to choose the best language for building a video editor in Linux, and slightly less important, a language that is widely used and liked in the Linux world. So, the idea of continuing to use C# for this project looks unlikely. =(

I have researched the Mono framework (which is a Linux version of the .NET framework), however I just found out that it has poor support for multi-media built-in. So, I don't feel to good about that. Also, it might be hard to convince Linux users to program in a Microsoft language... since I would like to open-source this project at some point.

I have widdled my options down to the 3 most widely used languages in Linux:

  • C++ - scary language... hard to debug... executes very fast
  • Python - great support of multi-media... easy to use... performance sucks
  • Java - fairly verbose language... medium difficulty... good performance... incomplete multi-media support