Re: [rgui-dev] ParaGUI or ClanLib binding

[Tom Sawyer]

On Tue, 2002-08-13 at 08:06, Leon Torres wrote:
> 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:

no problem. it will ba a little while before this comes to the forfront
anyway. definitly concentrate on those bindings.
 
> 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? ;)

amazing work! i am rather dumbfounded at how quickly you were able to do
this. but i am very glad to here it.

i don't do windows either. so i can't be of much help here. but let me
take your question and give it a post on ruby-talk and we'll see what
the community has to offer. and, if you'd like, i'll add that it would
be great if someone could volunteer takeup the task of a window's
compile. sound good?

> 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. :(

well, i say, don't worry about ClanLib if you don't feel a need to..
when i first discovered ClanLib i was impressed by the large library and
deverse offerings, but it turned out not to be as mature as i had
thought. i was also told that SDL is generally faster. so the
combination of ParaGUI and SDL should make for a top notch game
development platform as well as a good general purpose GUI.

> 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.

multiplatform is the goal, and our intention is to have a single common
api. so for every function GUtopIa offers, there is a translation down
to the backend --if that translation requires varying itself dependent
on the "view", then there will be special excpetions. but they won't be
seen from the surface. of course this can be tricky becasue it means we
have to be able to get every platform to act basically the same. so
that's the approach. but we will probably allow for a "pass-through"
mechinism as some point, for programmers wanting to target specfic
api/platform features not available from the GutopIa's common api.
hopefully we can make gutopia feature rich enough though that this will
be exceedingly rare, if ever.

Thanks Leon!