OpenEuphoria

Re: ActiveX

• Posted by "Cuny, David at DSS" <David.Cuny at DSS.CA.GOV> Feb 01, 2000
• 590 views

A couple of random thoughts.

[ActiveX]
I'm not terribly opposed to having wrappers to ActiveX components - I've
just never seen any instructions on how to do it. Even if I had the
instructions, I'm pretty busy for the next couple months.

[Wrapping Functions]
There's a huge amount of grunt work involved in converting a C include file
into something that can be used by Euphoria. What would be *really* nice is
a program that automatically build wrappers and data structures from C
include files. I've already written programa that convert the XLib and GTK
files, but they were hacked together. They did about 95% of the work, but
there was a lot of stuff that had to be cleaned up by hand.

I started working on a program that would *properly* parse .H files and
create .E files. I should start up work on that again.

Keep in mind that there's a lot more to wrapping functions than simply
placing a native call inside of Euphoria routine. A good library will hide a
lot of the details from the user. It's not something that just 'happens'; a
fair amount of planning has to go into the API, or you just end up with a
mess.

For example, VB does an *excellent* job hiding most of the details from the
user.

[Cross Platform]
Recently, I was considering writing a cross-platform library from scratch. I
put together a base library that worked on Win32, and was hammering away at
the X Windows version. Then I ran across screen shots of Aqua, the new
look-and-feel of the Mac OS X. I'm no longer convinced that you can play
catch-up on multiple platforms and stay up with all the trends.

I don't know that Robert is going to attach a commercial toolkit to
Euphoria, and almost all of the toolkits I've seen don't run on all the
platforms. Typically, the Mac and BeOS are left out. I suspect that it would
be acceptable to only run on Linux and Windows.

If the Win32 binaries for GTK weren't so huge, it would be real tempting to
use GTK as the cross-platform toolkit. It's been ported to Win32, and
there's actually a BeOS port in progress. The Wine project has been making
great progress in the last couple months - it might be possible to port
Win32 application to Linux using that.

In any event, I suspect that if people want a cross-platform toolkit,
they'll need to supply it themselves.

-- David Cuny