[M3devel] Modernising m3-ui?

Fri Jan 22 13:11:47 CET 2010

> > Trestle is easy to write for, but it really is butt ugly.

I should point that making Trestle not look ugly is perhaps

a much smaller task than wrapping any other library.

Randy's Win32 changes to Trestle definitely make it look better for example.

It was previously asserted that X Trestle shall not look like Win32.

However, X Trestle doesn't look like anything except itself, right?

So I figure Win32 is among the good choices.

Besides, given that there is no "standard X look", even if X Trestle

does look like *something*, Win32 would still be preferable.

(This would remove the forking we have where only one fork

or another has a bug, X vs. Win32..really need to merge/refactor

that code, no matter the decision and the resulting look..)

 - Jay

From: jay.krell at cornell.edu
To: dragisha at m3w.org; peter.mckinna at gmail.com
CC: m3devel at elegosoft.com
Subject: RE: [M3devel] Modernising m3-ui?
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2010 12:05:10 +0000

 > Linux desktop successful 

Haha. Military intelligence.

 > it's diversity of possible solutions.

Chaos! Lack of interop. Duplicated effort.
Granted, Darwinism/Capitalism, but very wasteful.

 > Main problem with diversity of solutions is multi-platform nature of 
 > Modula-3 - solutions not multi-platform are not likely to be accepted... 

I'm sure we can win here, if we do anything.
  (I'm not volunteering. The idea of using Swig is good.)
Just wrap Qt or FLTK or Tk or wxWidgets or such.
Qt is my preferred.
  It seems to have the most active resources spent on it and
  is in the best condition already.
GTk on Windows doesn't seem to get enough attention.
Tk has a seemingly good track record in that
 people have successfully used it already from several
 languages: Python, Perl, Tcl (blech!), C.
wxWidgets also has Python bindings at least.

Things only get less clear if you worry about non Win32/64/XWindows
platforms, like OS/2, Mac9, non-X Mac, Carbon/Cocoa, Win16, MS-DOS (framebuffer+mouse+keyboard), etc.
And Trestle doesn't support any of those anyway, and they are all
"obsolete" except non-X Mac (see also: iPhone!)
I'm surprised I haven't see that Qt supports iPhone.
If a library does support Carbon/Cocoa that is a point in favor imho.

 - Jay

> From: dragisha at m3w.org
> To: peter.mckinna at gmail.com
> Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:27:12 +0100
> CC: m3devel at elegosoft.com
> Subject: Re: [M3devel] Modernising m3-ui?
> 
> Modernizing of GUI is not so big a problem - lots of C(++) libraries
> around.... And after wrapping _LOTS OF_ C libraries I can tell one thing
> - there's nothing like a manual touch! And I've wrapped pthreads, mysql,
> sqlite, gtk, gtk2, zip, bzip2, zaptel, libpri .....and many more.
> 
> Modula-3 philosophy (at least it looks to me sometimes) is to think
> about Modula-3 legacy libraries/project like it's something carved in
> stone... To be kosher we must use right (legacy of course and
> all-platforms of coursier :)) libraries for every job.... Nice idea, esp
> when we whink longer term maintenance... But what made projects like,
> for example, Linux desktop successful is not single solution path - it's
> diversity of possible solutions.
> 
> Main problem with diversity of solutions is multi-platform nature of
> Modula-3 - solutions not multi-platform are not likely to be accepted...
> And while it's relatively easy to wrte your Modula-3 code multiplatfom,
> taking care of C(++) libraries can be real pain....
> 
> Thus said - I can tell you one thing - JUST DO IT :). I don't see a
> problem if my projects work only on Linux - once I have incentive to go
> through a hassle to make it work on Windows, I'll synchronize. But it's
> important to to many things with Modula-3 - more will come a lot easier.
> 
> On Fri, 2010-01-22 at 06:33 +1100, Peter McKinna wrote:
> > I've been looking at this area a bit. I have just completed the
> > interface to GLUT which should be ready to commit in a few weeks as
> > soon as i get a few more examples tested. This gives you the
> > conventional opengl/X linking. Its taken a while to get my head around
> > swig which seems a better way to feed into the C world. I have also
> > nearly completed a new interface for mysql giving it a safe M3
> > interface and gives the complete mysql.h api. I was thinking of using
> > swig for the gtk bindings but not sure how well the c++ mappings are
> > handled 
> > 
> > regards Peter 
> > 
> > 
> > On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 11:50 AM, Chris <Highjinks at gmx.com> wrote:
> > It looks like most of the libs(Trestle, X11R4, OpenGL, etc...)
> > in m3-ui haven't been touched or updated since the early 90s.
> > 
> > Seems like modernising it might attract some more developers.
> > i.e. Bring the X interface up to date(X11R6) and support
> > things like DRM, XRandr, etc... And update OpenGL for NURBS,
> > VBOs, etc...
> > Trestle is easy to write for, but it really is butt ugly.
> > 
> > Is anyone else looking at this area of the system?
> > 
> > 
> > --
> > Chris <Highjinks at gmx.com>
> > 
> -- 
> Dragiša Durić <dragisha at m3w.org>
> 

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