I decided to choose Java to get better platform independence, todays C++ compilers are so complex that it is very difficult to create good platform independent C++ code, when I made the switch there was no good GUI library that worked on both Windows and Linux (I think GTK sucks and Qt was not available for free on Windows), today Qt is available with GPL licenese on all platforms, but it is terrible to get it working most compilers give up with internal compilation errors and crap like that, it take ages to compile the code and so on, so I decided to give Java a try.

I use Netbeans as my IDE for Java and I love it, it is very nice, you do need a pretty ok computer and lots of ram to use it, but as long as you have that is very good.

I am not a GPL fanatic, the important thing for me is that MagicLight is free as in money, I do find GPL to be a pretty ok license and I do not see any reason not to use it for MagicLight, even though the IRIT dll is not GPL, it uses a "Free for non commercial use" licese.

Mikael

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