Re: Block Text in Win32lib
- Posted by irv Mar 25, 2015
- 2017 views
I am currently working on my own GTK wrapper for windows. Its using the 3.6.4, I know its not the newest, but its the newest one for windows. So many underscores in the GTK library.
I would encourage anyone who wants to make Euphoria more useful, but I do have to point out something that should be obvious: writing a usable Euphoria/GUI wrapper is a huge task, whether for Windows, GTK, Qt, Wx, or whatever. Wouldn't it be a lot more productive to spend your time improving something that is already usable, something already, let's say, 90% or more complete?
Also, let me say that EuGTK is unlikely to ever be entirely satisfactory on Windows, for the reason you point out - the Gtk/Windows dlls always lag behind the current GTK version. And for a reason you didn't mention - it will always be another wedge between the user and the os. A wedge that has to be kept up to date with Windows as well as with GTK. Twice as much work. Four times as much testing.
Don't forget that there are people who just don't want to run GTK on Windows, just as there are people who don't want to run Windows programs on Linux, using Wine. Even if it works perfectly, it just doesn't 'feel right' somehow.
Actually, if we could get the same Euphoria source code to run on all 3 platforms, that would be ideal. We'd simply include a different 'engine' for GTK, Windows, or whatever, and we'd get similar results. Similar, but not identical, since each platform has its own look and feel.
For a while, I thought I might be able to rewrite the 'guts' of EuGTK - basically, the widget[] structure, which is just one big array of call prototypes - to call Windows functions. Then I realized that there is just too much difference between GTK and Windows designs to allow this to work. Object-oriented vs. not, automatic layout vs. manual, the differences go on and on. If someone smarter than me can do this - please step forward. I am willing to help.
