OpenEuphoria

Re: Windows stuff...

• Posted by Tommy Carlier <tommy.carlier at pandora.be> Sep 13, 2004
• 481 views

Patrick Barnes wrote:
> To program in windows using only the standard libraries is very time
> consuming and annoying.
> Excellent work has been done in 3rd party projects like win32lib and
> w32engine.
> Some people find one or both of these restrictive, and so go off and
> use a different system...
> 
> This means that programmers are using different windows libraries to
> write their own code, and to convert a library to use a different
> windows library is difficult, if not impossible.
> 
> What do you think about collaborating to produce a common core to
> these windowing systems, that can be extended to produce a library
> that caters to different needs?
> 
> For a start, one include file should have every windows API constant,
> and be compatible across the board. Perhaps it should be included in
> the euphoria installer as a standard include.

I agree that there is a need for a core library, but that library should be very
limited. The API constants are necessary. But I think that it would be useful, if
instead of a Euphoria-library, these definitions (constants, functions,
structures) would be available as a database. Different libraries use different
functions to define structures, and to load DLLs and functions. If the API
definitions are available as a database, anyone could generate Euphoria-code from
it.

> From that, common procedures could be agreed upon. Some things are
> common across all flavours of windows library - opening a dialog box
> and getting a result, the concept of an event handler, low-level
> routines like timers etc....

I don't totally agree with this statement: if you force such common procedures,
people will be limited to write libraries that all look the same. What if one
wants to write a library that doesn't use an event-system, or if it uses an
event-system that looks totally different than the common event-system? If such a
common event-system would exist, how would it look? I have to say: the Win32Lib
event-system is easy to use and pretty advanced, but what's the point of writing
a (revolutionary?) new library if you're going to stick with old habits.

> The internals of the procedures and functions as implemented by
> windows library designers do not have to be the same, but their
> abstract behaviour should be the same, or similar enough to make
> compatibility much easier.

I disagree: the abstract behaviour of a Windows library should not be the same
as any other Windows library. That's why I'm starting the new library: to make a
library that doesn't suffer from backward compatibility (yet), and that
implements some new features and ideas that haven't been implemented before.
Compatibility can be a good thing, but is also very limiting.

--
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