1. Linux and X Windows
- Posted by David Cuny <dcuny at LANSET.COM>
Jan 16, 1999
-
Last edited Jan 17, 1999
Any hints as to what kind of support Euphoria/Linux will eventually have for
X Windows?
There are a number of different high level toolkits available - Motif,
LessTiff (free Motif clone), GTK (Gimp Toolkit) and Qt. There has been a bit
of contention in the Linux world over Qt (and the K Desktop), but now that
Qt is open source, maybe things will settle down...
Personally, I sort of wish that Rob would choose a cross-platform toolkit.
I've heard *great* things about Zinc (which even supports DOS, Win95, Linux
and even the Mac), but Rob would have to shell out about $3000 to cover all
those platforms - not very likely, and the API is C++, so I'm not sure how
easy it would be for Rob to write wrappers for it.
There are a number of nice free libraries that offer cross-platform support.
V has an easy API that supports Win95 and X Windows, and is apparently not
*too* bloated, but doesn't plan on ever having Mac support. Then again, I'm
not sure that Rob ever plans to support the Mac either. The latest release
of WxWindows looks even better, and supports Win95, GTC, Motif and has a
number of pending platforms, including Qt and the Mac. But both of these are
C++ based, and again I have no idea how feasible it is to write wrappers for
these.
OK, so much for wishful thinking - a cross-platform library seems fairly
unlikely. So what X Windows toolkit will Rob support?
My guess is that XLib is the most reasonable choice - it's the lowest API
level, so it will run on all flavors of X Windows. From what I've seen of
the API, it looks like Rob could probably write some code to generate the
wrappers automatically, and leave the complex stuff (loading the appropriate
C structures) to the programmer. Then again, I haven't actually *seen*
XLIB.H yet, just the high-level calls to it.
If it would help get XLib added to the release sooner, maybe Rob could farm
out the work of writing the wrappers to someone on the list? I'm guessing
that we could do this without giving away any of RDS' trade secrets if
Euphoria/Linux supports c_func/c_proc type interfaces.
Of course, XLib doesn't actually support any widgets (it's *very* low
level), but I'm busy trying to redesign Dos32Lib so it might be possible to
port to XLib - as if I didn't have enough to do. 
Comments?
-- David Cuny
