Re: [gtk-list] Re: GTK for Win32

[Steve Hosgood <iisteve iiweeble swan ac uk>]

It's interesting to see that only three weeks after the previous conversation
on this subject, it is resurrected by a couple of commercial software
companies who are possibly dissatisfied enough with Micro$oft enough that
they'd look at doing the oft-mentioned port!

In the same thread, Walt Pohl <pohl@math.washington.edu> writes:
> I have been thinking about the feasability of porting GTK to Win32, and it
> seems to me the easiest thing would be to write an X server that runs over
> Win 32 [...].
>

A sort of XFree86-Win32? That would be very nice.

> The alternative would be to port GTK itself as a kind of substitute for
> MFC.  You could just port GDK (the Gimp Drawing Kit) which is a wrapper
> for X windows.
>

The upshot of the last time this topic came up was that since GTK sits on
top of GDK, once you've done GDK, you've got GTK as well.

> I'm sure the key thing would be avoiding the work of rewriting every
> widget yourself.
>

You shouldn't have to. Widgets are GTK concepts, and as stated above, you
ought to get all of GTK for free once you've ported GDK.

> If you are interested in porting GTK, one place to look for models would
> be the port of Tcl/Tk to Win32.
> 

I think someone suggested this last time too, but it turned out that the
GUI part of TCL/TK had been totally rewritten in Windoze-friendly fashion.

I'll just echo the sentiment that the gurus posted last time, i.e. "if you
want Win-NT support, then get on and do the port" :-)

I suspect anyone with a serious need/interest to do such a thing would get
plenty of advice and support from this list. It's just no-one's going to do
it for you! (All too busy writing IRC clients in GTK! :-})

Interesting side-issue. I've never even contemplated this before, but is there
such a thing as a un*x-hosted GCC-based development environment that will
produce WinNT/98/95 executables? If it doesn't exist, then writing one would
surely have to be a pre-requisite of the GDK porting job?

--

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