Curious about the language choice behind Bazaar’s development

[trya2l]

Hi,

First, I want to say I really like Bazaar — the idea and the app. I think they are are great!

I’m more curious about the choice of programming language. As a junior developer, I was a bit surprised to see Bazaar written in C, especially for a modern GTK app. Given concerns about memory safety and the popularity of languages like Go, Rust, or Zig for such projects, I wondered what motivated the decision to use C? Was it a matter of personal preference, performance considerations, or something else, like gnome-software referenced code ?

Thanks for the pointers, and I hope my question doesn't come across as rude, as I'm simply asking out of curiosity.

Best of luck,

Allan

[kolunmi]

Hi sorry, for the delay, I was going to respond then forgot 😵‍💫

I used C because the libraries I needed are all C, and less importantly because I like the language. I didn't want to mess with any bindings to gtk, flatpak, etc, so yeah. I want to make my next project in rust because it sounds fun, but I don't really believe you should avoid C if you are confident in your abilities to control it.

thanks for the question, and I hope you have a good day

[trya2l]

Hello,

No problem at all. Tbh, I was more concerned about my question sounding a bit blunt.

Your explanation makes a lot of sense. In fact, I don't know much about Linux app development, but as you point out, a lot of libraries are still written in C.

I didn't know that writing bindings is necessary for this kind of work.

Thanks for the reply, and again, best of luck 😄