Born out of his work on developing the GNOME Builder integrated development environment (IDE) over the past decade, one of the recent initiatives by GNOME developer Christian Hergert has been on Foundry, a new “IDE in a box” of sorts and with CLI tooling complementary to the GNOME Builder IDE graphical environment.
With Christian Hergert not being at the GUADEC conference this year, he published a slide deck to highlight his recent work on GNOME Builder and in turn GNOME Foundry — along with venting, “Often times GNOME bureaucratic processes exhaust any energy I had left.“
Foundry extracts much of the GNOME Builder functionality into a library and associated command-line tool. This opens up some GNOME Builder features to CLI/terminal die-hards or those that may prefer other code editors while working on GNOME/GTK applications. GNOME Builder has built up a lot of rich features over the years that to now couldn’t be easily reused outside of the Builder app itself.
Foundry in its early stage already offers a lot of features for GNOME/GTK app developers, like the ability to carry out basic unit tests, a variety of offered services, and other integration helpers.
Hergert commented on his blog that he feels Foundry has the potential to be far more useful than Builder alone. Those wanting to learn more about Foundry can do so via this PDF slide deck. The Foundry code is available via GNOME.org GitLab.
