Re: [rgui-dev] ParaGUI or ClanLib binding

[Leon Torres]

On 10 Aug 2002, Tom Sawyer wrote:

> since your motivation is toward a game you are developing and therefore
> will reuqire the "higher-order" capabilities of GUtopIa, which we have
> not yet explored, i will happily turn that leading task over to you. if
> you accept, it then ultimatly falls to you to determine if we should use
> ParaGUI/SDL or ClanLib, and to be the primary advisor on how the GUtopIa
> Meta-API needs to reflect the requiremets of that backend. let me know
> if this works for you.

Whoa, that's a tall order! Let's not go there yet, I still have to wrestle
with the bindings and evaluations before I can do any Guitopia stuff.
Here's my progress report:

So far, I've managed to swig the latest cvs of Paragui, which is very
good news! That means one can "swig -ruby" without error (after writing
just _one_ ruby-specific interface function), then do ruby -e "require
'paragui'; puts Paragui.constants" and get a nice list of bindings. The
Paragui developers did a very sweet thing by making their swig interface
definitions language agnostic. Unfortunately, I now have to get very
familiar with the GNU autotools and various other arcane, multiplatform
build topics. That will take time. Also, as I don't have MSVC++, I'm
going to have to, uh, 'borrow' a friend's MSVC++ .NET to test out the MS
side. Unfortunately, I don't have any idea what the issues are regarding
using that compiler. Are there any gotchas with MSVC++ .NET that I should
be aware of, ruby-wise and in general? Should I find an older version, or
can I get by using just mingw? Or perhaps someone else can take care of
this? ;)

As for ClanLib, the output of 'fgrep -r -i swig *' in the latest src
returned nothing. That's not good! Also, they aren't endian clean,
which means they only support the x86 architecture. I'll take a closer
look today and ask their mailing list about these issues, but it doesn't
look like ClanLib will meet the criteria. :(

Hmm.. is there a criteria for how multiplatform guitopia will be, or can
we make special exceptions for the various views? I know that the game
coders will love to be as multiplatform as SDL and OpenGL are.

Until further progress,

- Leon