Daan, Krasimir, Wolfgang, On Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 02:32:50PM +0100, Daan Leijen wrote:
Maybe Krasimir can tell us more about the issues involved? Uhum. I read Krasimir's email. One quick question to verify that I understood: The intermediate layer of Clean's Object I/O is written in C because it is difficult to call Clean from C?
This actually brings me to another issue I have been wondering about. Why don't we use the GTK library as our portable GUI library directly? I may have missed some discussions about this, but if it is a really portable library, we can use the fruits of their labor. (Of course, it does need to give a native look and fool, I wonder whether GTK does that?) Wolfgang gave a good answer to that and I am convinced that Gtk alone is not the answer.
I do not like the evolutionary approach. It will lead to an API which changes a lot.
Well, we both started out as amoebes but evolutionized into beings that use electrical signals to exchange opinions about how to create specific patterns on cathode ray tubes :-) :-) Thanks Daan! The first time I really had to laugh reading all these messages...
But seriously. We are trying to create a medium-level interface. The Port approach is to create that using two layers: one core medium-level interface (Port) and a convenience layer on top of that, using abstraction, overloading etc (GIO/Htoolkit). Ok, I'll look at Ports and especially GIO over the weekend. The syntax of GIO looks really clever!
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The other approach, that you are proposing, is to define just one medium level interface (with abstraction and all) and to implement backends for each platform directly. The advantage is that it probably easier to support more backends. The disadavantage is that you need to do more work for a port. Yes, true. But I think it is not as difficult to bind to a more abstract layer.
You hear from me :-), Axel.