Re: Is there a good Windows or cross-platform Euphoria IDE?
- Posted by dcuny Oct 20, 2015
- 8855 views
I'll be up-front about this: I think OE should adopt the wxWidgets library.
It's a full-featured, cross-platform library. So not only do you get GUI controls, but you get support for stuff that other libraries leave out, like printing, graphics and audio. (Although the audio support leaves something to be desired).
I'm also voting to statically compile it. wxBasic did that, and weighed in at less than 1000K.
I know there's the whole "Euphoria should be minimal" argument. But it's stuff like that which drives me back to using other languages.
For example, for my current application, I need to render a bitmap of an FFT. It should be easy, right?
But OE only supports 256 color bitmaps. Rendering lines, fonts or shapes? They aren't there anymore. Color support? I need to write my own routine to handle the palette. Fonts? All the old libraries are tied to DOS, so they don't work anymore.
I'd also like to play back an audio file. Again, there's no native support in OE.
These things should be supported by OE. But they're not, so I'm currently writing a thin wrapper for Tk using the Tcl Wrapper, mainly because it can plug into the awesome Snack sound toolkit. Grumble.
Full disclosure: Only my stubborn insistence that OE have a library which supports native widgets (and possibly statically compile to the library) keeps EuGTK from getting my whole-hearted approval. 
One "nice to have" for OE would be a better way to declare callbacks. I understand there are issues with scoping, and arguments for minimalism about using routine_id(). But it's always feels clunky. There's got to be a more elegant way to do things.
