OpenEuphoria

Re: EU future

• Posted by David Cuny <dcuny at LANSET.COM> Aug 11, 2000
• 391 views

Asif Masood Baloch wrote:

> Is [Euphoria] platform independent/dependent
> when it comes to GUI/windowmanagers such as
> enlightenment, gnome, kde for Linux OS?

Euphoria/Linux is primarily a console application, like in DOS. It doesn't
have a 'native' windowing toolkit built into it. That doesn't mean that you
can't write GUI applications under Linux. Using dynamic link libraries, you
can link it to various windowing toolkits in Linux. For example, I've
personally done small applications using raw XLib (bleah) and GTK+.

While Enlightenment is a window manager, Gnome and KDE are not. Instead,
they are desktop environments for Linux. Gnome and KDE have 'preferred'
window managers that pay attention to various hints (such as application
color, font, etc.) For example, Gnome recently changed their 'official'
window manager from Enlightenment to Sawmill. But neither require a
particular manager

Gnome (http://www.gnome.org) is based on the GTK (http://www.gtk.org) is
written in C, and it's fairly straight-forward to write wrappers in
Euphoria. I've got some old, incomplete wrappers for it; you can at find
them at http://www.lanset.com/dcuny/llama.htm.

Qt (http://www.trolltech.com) is used to build the immensely popular KDE
desktop (http://www.kde.org). It is possibly a better toolkit than GTK+
(more stable, and better documented), but it's reliance on C++ and the Qt
MOC pre-processor makes it more difficult to wrap for Euphoria. Qt also has
a more limited licensing scheme.

Writing wrappers for either of these toolkits by hand would be quite a
chore. At some point, I should start working on the Linux port of SWIG for
Euphoria (http://www.swig.org). Building wrappers for GTK+ should be fairly
straightforward. Because of the MOC pre-processor, Qt would probably take a
bit more work, but I can't think of a compelling reason why it shldn't work.


> Do these window managers have to be coded in
> C or [some other language]? Why not code them
> in this beautiful EU?

The *window managers* take care of drawing the window frames, focus policy,
and other stuff. Window toolkits (like XLib, GTK and Qt) draw the various
buttons and controls. I don't think there's that much demand for yet another
window manager for Linux.

Writing a set of wrappers can be quite time consuming, and there really
isn't a good set of them for Euphoria under Linux at this point. Personally,
I think that Robert adding something platform independant like wxWindows to
Euphoria(http://www.wxwindows.org) like wxPython did is the best way to go.

-- David Cuny