Re: Run Gnome -- On Windows (fwd)

[Brian Behlendorf <brian collab net>]

On 10 Dec 2000, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> I'm much more pleased with this effort than with the way XP is done
> for OpenOffice (haven't read that whole thread, but I did read your
> post). The approach here was to use a port of the layers underneath
> GNOME to windows, rather than to create an XP compat layer on top of
> them. This can result in lower overhead and better outside developer
> compatibility than the OpenOffice approach.

For one reason or another, Apache developers decided that Posix on Windows
was never going to be a successful API, due to inherent differences with
any MS architecture and the model Posix was designed for.  This was
especially true for threads, process management, and I/O efficiency.  I
could probably ask one of the Apache Win32 developers to write up a white
paper on why.

> That being said, I think the AbiWord approach of writing essentially
> separate front-end code for each platform is also better than the
> OpenOffice full XP API approach - it allows each platform to support
> it's own unique features and progress at it's own rate, rather than
> enforcing a least-common-denominator leavel of features, integration
> and interoperability.

Yeah, it kinda changes how you view the "top" of the stack.  I.e., the
application can be thought of as "platform-specific interfaces that
marshalls together underlying platform-agnostic business objects", in
Abiword, and in Mozilla or OO it's "platform-agnostic business objects
that marshall underlying platform-specific interfaces".  I think the
AbiWord approach is going to produce more native-feeling apps, but I think
generally they'll take longer to write and debug.  Of course it is highly
parallelizable.



I guess I'm not suggesting necessarily that Gnome take on supporting Win32
directly; what I am suggesting is that the Gnome Foundation make it very
clear to people writing applications what abstraction layer Gnome
provides, so that the application developers can decide best how to write
their code if running equally well on Win32 and Gnome-based platforms is a
design goal.  

	Brian