Re: [gtk-list] Re: Excuse me for mentioning the unmentionable, but...

[Steve Hosgood <iisteve iiweeble swan ac uk>]

> On Mon, 15 Jun 1998, Tor Lillqvist wrote:
> > Surely somebody has thought about the feasibility of, or even tried,
> > porting gdk and gtk+ to Win32?...
> 
> What would be the point, other than making yet another application 
> framework that wraps around the windows API?
> 

The point (AFAIK) would be that people who write all these wonderful
applications for X would also be able to cross-compile them so that they'd
be runnable by Windoze Lusers.

As for the practicality of such a thing, well there's the rub. From
my limited experience of writing Windoze 3.11 programs with the pure
API as described (rather well) in Charles Petzold's book, I'd say that
such cross-portability is a pipe dream.

Windoze isn't a proper multi-tasking environment. Or at least, W3.11
wasn't. I doubt W95 is any better. When writing Windoze programs for
W3.11, the programmer constantly has to be aware that it is up to
her to maintain the illusion of multi-tasking by never allowing a
thread to block, or even to spend too much time in a loop. GTK programmers
never have to worry about such things.

Spend too long in a thread in W3.11, and the event stack overflows (!) and
all the most recent events get dropped on the floor. You don't get
told about this, but the user finds that several of his last key-clicks
don't get through!

Then there's the disasterous memory allocation techniques to worry about,
though possibly if GTK were to concentrate only on supporting 32-bit
programming, some of that might go away. Does W95 make any use of the
memory-management on the [345]86 chip? W3.11 used to have this concept
of "thunks" that you had to manipulate pretty much by hand - I never did get
my head around it. Basically, it's all a recipe for "blue screen of
death". MS themselves evidently never understood it, judging by how often
MS Word and other such masterpieces suffer wipeouts.

Having said all that, Petzold's book on Windoze programming was an
invaluable resource full of useful code fragments, tips and clear
explanations of a difficult subject. We would benefit greatly from such a
clear book on GTK. That's not meant to knock the writers of the tutorial,
but the tutorial still has a way to go yet.

--

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