Well I am just curios if with the new generics in .NET Framework 2.0 the GoDiagram library will change.
I know this is a hard decision to make because the changes would be
huge. Actually I do not see any way to keep the compatibility and to
benefit in the same time from the generics add.
On the other hand I think the benefits can be huge in terms of speed if the design would be correctly done.
What is you opinion on this. Do you see any advantage for a graphical
library to base its design on generics? Do you think the speed is
important (and it can be achieved with generics)?
I suspect that the performance improvement would be insignificant in the base library. The last time we did performance monitoring most of the time went into other things such as bookkeeping and Graphics painting.
If GoCollection were re-implemented to avoid using the old ArrayList, there would certainly be less casting to GoObject. However, there are normally a lot of type checks and safe casts to particular subclasses or to interfaces, such as to IGoLink. Those operations would remain the same even when using generics.
Further investigation is planned. But as a component vendor we want our components to have the broadest possible platform coverage, so we prefer to target the earliest platform version whenever possible. That means .NET 1.0 and .NET Compact 1.1.