OpenEuphoria

Re: Midgard

• Posted by Martin Stachon <martin.stachon at tiscali.cz> Aug 23, 2004
• 431 views

Travis Beaty wrote:
> 
> Hello Mr. Stachon!
> 
> As I indicated in the documentation, at this time I have no plans to 
> consciously make Midgard cross-platform.  If I have a lot of people request 
> that I do so, I could be persuaded to do my best not to write any 
> platform-specific code.  As far as reasoning for this is concerned, again, 
> I've outlined that in the documentation, but to summarize:
> 
> I haven't coded anything for Windows in quite a long while, and the only 
> reason I even have Windows on my machine is for the sake of my scanner.  (I 
> bought it cheap, and it has to have Windows ... got to be a correlation 
> there.)  Other than that, I don't use Windows, and if turned on and left to 
> its own devices, the computer defaults to booting into Linux.  I share many 
> of Mr. Mullins' opinions concerning Windows, but I won't expound on them 
> here, as I recently donated my asbestos underwear to the volunteer fire 
> department.

You surely have much more knowledge about Qt than me (I always prefered
GTK/Gnome applications for Linux) But from what I read on trolltech's website,
it should be easy to write cross-platform code with Qt as it handles also
file operation, threading, networking, etc.

> While Qt in Linux is distributed under the GPL (actually, it is dual-licensed 
> and is available under the Q Public License as well), Qt for Windows is not.  
> In order to legally develop using Qt in Windows, the purchase of a license is 
> required.  The cheapest license that I found for Qt while looking through 
> their website was $1,500 US.  Given I don't ordinarily code for Windows, and 
> have no plans to, I simply can't justify the expense.  Therefore, even if I 
> did try to make Midgard cross-platform, I would have no way to test it on my 
> own machine.

This is the real problem. I love linux, but not everybody does so, so I'd like
my applications to be cross-platform. So I'll probably stick to GTK.

But I saw some opensource projects running with Qt/Windows, for example the Psi
Jabber client (http://psi.affinix.com/) Did they buy the license?

> The best that I could do, again, would be to make sure there is no 
> platform-specific code, and if there is, place it in a if platform() = ... 
> then  block.
> 
> That having been said, considering the cross-platform capabilities of both Qt 
> and Euphoria, it should, in theory, be trivial to port Midgard.  There is 
> only one function in the Euphoria code that would have porting issues, and 
> that would be a simple matter to fix.  As far as the shared library code 
> (written in C++ with exposed functions declared with extern "C"), I can think 
> of no issues off the top of my head.  I can't see why MinGW wouldn't be able 
> to build the shared library code into a .dll with a little tweaking of the 
> makefile ... assuming, of course, that the both the developer and target 
> machines have the Windows versions of the Qt Development tools to link 
> against.
> 
> At this point, to build the shared library, the only items you would need to 
> have are the Qt shared libraries, the header files, and the moc meta-object 
> compiler.  Oh yeah, and a $1,500 license.
> 
> Remember too that Midgard is also licensed under the GPL.  It is under that 
> license no matter what operating system it resides on.  This means that if 
> you happen to have a license for Qt for Windows, and you want to port it, 
> have at 'er.  If that is the case, it might be best to wait until I have 
> released a beta as opposed to "previews" ... Midgard is extremely unstable at 
> the moment, and the code could violently change between releases until I get 
> the thing pinned down.
> 
> I hope this answers your question.  Have a wonderful day!

Thanks for the information.
Have a nice day too!

	Martin