wxWidgets

[da9000]

Caius wrote:
Oh, btw: Emacs is the ultimate Unix editor  :-D

Wikipedia begs to differ:

vi became the de facto standard Unix editor and a nearly undisputed hacker favorite outside of MIT until the rise of Emacs after about 1984. As of 2007 either vi or one of its clones can still be found on nearly all installations of Unix. The Single UNIX Specification specifies vi, so any system conforming to the Single UNIX Specification will have vi.

vi is still widely used by users of Unix variants. About half the respondents in a 1991 USENET poll preferred vi.[1] It starts up faster than the bulkier versions of Emacs and uses less memory. Consequently, even some Emacs fans will resort to it as a mail editor and for small editing jobs. In 1999, Tim O'Reilly, founder of the eponymous computer book publisher, stated that his company sold more copies of its vi book than its emacs book.[3]

BTW, I'm no fan of either (Boxer, an PC/MS-DOS editor is my favorite - could do column marking/blocking/selections!! And had awesome macro functionality), nor do I want to start a religious war, but thought I'd point out the statistical evidence (O'Reilly's numbers, etc) :-)

[Caius]

Just because something is widely used doesn't make it "best". Just as with anything else, it's a matter of personal taste. Nothing else really matters. Hence the smiley in my comment.

[Caius]

But back on topic.

Surely there's got to be better alternatives than wxWidgets? With "better" I really mean light-weight. I can only imagine how it would work on a stock A1200. Would most likely be slow, and take a lot of memory. Note that I'm only assuming here. I don't actually know this for sure. But I think that any cross-platform GUI library, aimed at including classic Amiga, should run well on a stock A1200.

[da9000]

Hence my smiley after "statistical evidence". I agree with your definition of best.

Caius wrote:
Surely there's got to be better alternatives than wxWidgets? With "better" I really mean light-weight. I can only imagine how it would work on a stock A1200. Would most likely be slow, and take a lot of memory. Note that I'm only assuming here. I don't actually know this for sure. But I think that any cross-platform GUI library, aimed at including classic Amiga, should run well on a stock A1200.

I also think it won't be so lightweight, but then again, it's more popular than many other toolkits and on more platforms, which was a concern that Hans had.

As for target machine, I don't know if a stock A1200 should be the base (maybe too low? how about RAM?). I guess it depends on what the authors have in mind.


EDIT:
I've not looked at it in depth, but I recall hearing of this:

http://www.microwindows.org/

And more:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windowing_system

[Hans_]

Caius wrote:
Could be an interesting project I guess. C++ is my primary language so it shouldn't be problematic.

Still there are a couple of things holding me back:

1) I have no previous experience with wxWidgets; and
2) I'd never even dream on working on a project of this scale alone. Should probably be at least 3 active developers, since it'd be a hobby project.

We currently have 5 people listed on the sourceforge page.

Hans

[Hans_]

Caius wrote:
But back on topic.

Surely there's got to be better alternatives than wxWidgets? With "better" I really mean light-weight. I can only imagine how it would work on a stock A1200. Would most likely be slow, and take a lot of memory. Note that I'm only assuming here. I don't actually know this for sure. But I think that any cross-platform GUI library, aimed at including classic Amiga, should run well on a stock A1200.

AFAIK it's the only cross-platform GUI toolkit that uses native widgets. How fast/slow it is depends on how it's event handling is implemented. Also, it's fairly modular so if their's some component that you don't need, don't add it to you project.

We'll have to see how resource hungry it is. I doubt that you're going to find any cross-platform GUI toolkit that's fast on a stock A1200. Even MUI is sluggish on that machine. I was going to say that there are PalmOS and Windows CE wxWidgets ports on the way, but the average PDA has more memory and a much faster CPU than a stock A1200.

Hans

[Caius]

Yes, I've been to the SourceForge page. I've got a few
points to make:

1) I've browsed the CVS repository. Apart from a couple of
minor updates to compile under OS4, there hasn't been any
activity for two years. That's why I said active developers.

2) It would be fun to help out in such a project, but as
I've mentioned I have no previous experience with wxWidgets.
Therefore the project needs to be lead by someone who knows
the code well, who can delegate tasks to the other
developers. This person must, obviously, be highly active.

3) The project needs to be kept in sync with the main
wxWidgets project. wxWidgets v3 is approaching, and there
is no point in making a port that is quickly outdated.
Therefore the CVS repository must be updated/synchronised
with the main wxWidgets project on a regular basis.
A little more work, yes, but otherwise there would be no
point in doing this at all.

In other words, I'm waiting for someone to assume
leadership of this project. And no, it can't be me for the
reason stated above.

(Also, having no access to OS4-capable hardware, I could
only work on the AmigaOS 3.x code).

So that's basically where I stand.

[Caius]

Oh, and I've been reading up a little on wxWidgets. I don't
think it is as heavy as I thought. Seems to be implemented
as a thin wrapper around native code. In other words, a
front end to whatever GUI API it's implemented on. The
overhead of such wrappers are generally low. I've written
such wrappers myself (MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite), and
it performed just as well as using the C APIs directly.

Which raises another question. Best performance would
probably be gained from implementing directly on top of
intuition.library. However, the port would most likely
be developed much faster if implemented via ReAction or
MUI. Both of these are available on OS4, yes?

[Hans_]

Caius wrote:
Yes, I've been to the SourceForge page. I've got a few
points to make:

1) I've browsed the CVS repository. Apart from a couple of
minor updates to compile under OS4, there hasn't been any
activity for two years. That's why I said active developers.

Yes, that was me. The original two developers stopped working on it a few years ago because no-one else was interested. As you noticed, it's a big project.

2) It would be fun to help out in such a project, but as
I've mentioned I have no previous experience with wxWidgets.
Therefore the project needs to be lead by someone who knows
the code well, who can delegate tasks to the other
developers. This person must, obviously, be highly active.

Unfortunately, I'm only just starting to learn the wxWidgets API and the original developers are really busy with other projects.

3) The project needs to be kept in sync with the main
wxWidgets project. wxWidgets v3 is approaching, and there
is no point in making a port that is quickly outdated.
Therefore the CVS repository must be updated/synchronised
with the main wxWidgets project on a regular basis.
A little more work, yes, but otherwise there would be no
point in doing this at all.

I've been meaning to have a go at doing this, but haven't had any time.

In other words, I'm waiting for someone to assume
leadership of this project. And no, it can't be me for the
reason stated above.

(Also, having no access to OS4-capable hardware, I could
only work on the AmigaOS 3.x code).

So that's basically where I stand.

Understood. The good thing is that most AmigaOS 3.x code should work on the other systems too. I obviously can't do anything for MorphOS, but I'm sure that someone with MorphOS could at least adapt my code for the MorphOS version.

Personally, I can't take the lead in this project either, but I am going to work on small pieces from time to time.  

Hans

[Hans_]

Caius wrote:
Oh, and I've been reading up a little on wxWidgets. I don't
think it is as heavy as I thought. Seems to be implemented
as a thin wrapper around native code. In other words, a
front end to whatever GUI API it's implemented on. The
overhead of such wrappers are generally low. I've written
such wrappers myself (MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite), and
it performed just as well as using the C APIs directly.

Which raises another question. Best performance would
probably be gained from implementing directly on top of
intuition.library. However, the port would most likely
be developed much faster if implemented via ReAction or
MUI. Both of these are available on OS4, yes?

Yes OS4 has both. I'm not sure if MorpOS has Reaction (AROS  doesn't) so MUI would probably be the way to go. WxWidgets also has its own version of all widgets (the wxUniversal module) which would be a good intermediate step before wrapping Reaction/MUI.

Hans