wxWidgets

[Caius]

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.

[Caius]

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

[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.

[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is no point in making a port that is quickly outdated.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?