Cobra looks awesome, but...

[tleedavidson]

Hi All,

I really don't mean to offend anyone, but ... is Cobra dying?

A look at the Cobra report at Ohloh.com shows that the number of code commits has been steadily declining. And it appears that there is only one contributor. There doesn't seem to be alot of activity here either.

It would be quite a shame if it really is dying. I was excited when I discovered it, and saw that it offers dynamic and static binding, first class support for testing, on-the-fly compile, etc! I sincerely hope it is alive and growing.

Should I look elsewhere for my Mono programming language of choice, or is there a hopeful future for Cobra?

Thank you for understanding my hopes and concerns.

T. Lee

[Charles]

Definitely not dying. I've just been working more on CobraPad recently which is currently a private project.

Also, ohloh doesn't show when a committer is applying a patch from a contributor. Or at least, when I researched it, I did not find any standard way to convey this information. I do however, put a "credit:<name>" line in the commit message.

nerdzero is currently working on MonoDevelop support and recently applied a pull request from another contributor.

This fall, I expect to cut another Cobra release, the first Cobra Pad 0.1 and I'm sure nerdzero will then release a new version of the MonoDevelop add-in.

HTH

[nerdzero]

I work on something Cobra related almost every day. The addin has not seen much development activity lately because I'm currently working on a new library which will provide a parser that understands broken code. We need this for better code completion results.

However, the new parser has also been sidetracked as I've now shifted gears to support compiling via MSBuild. The next version of MonoDevelop/Xamarin Studio will build projects using MSBuild by default and this would not be a very nice user experience for newcomers since they would have to manually set all their projects to not use MSBuild. I'm pretty close to having something that works. I can compile projects as long as they don't include any references. For some reason, MSBuild is trying to load the references twice which causes compilation to fail. I can't seem to figure out what I'm doing wrong yet.

Hops has also provided a lot of patches that have yet to be applied to the compiler.

So, not dying. Just a very small community that needs to grow! I would love to see more work on VisualCobra and also the web server that torial started working on.

[tleedavidson]

Thank you for your responses. Rather quick responses they were, too. And not simple, terse responses either. You took the time to actually say something.

I think I'm going to like this community

And, I now feel confident curling up with Cobra.

Thanks again,
T. Lee