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

[Jim Harmon <jharmon telecnnct com>]

Steve Hosgood wrote:
> 
> > 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.

Except for the unnecessary slamming of Windows, your points are well
made.

I'm only responding because this is sounding A LOT like the MAC
distribution lists I subscribe to, where every other phrase in the text
is a signifigant slam on Windows in one form or another.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a Solaris Admin, but I also administer NT,
Win95, Win3.x, DOS, and MAC OS.

For those without the shear balls to transition to LINUX or other UNIX
envirmonment on Intel, 68K, etc.,  Windows is a clearly superior
solution to any non-UNIX problem.

For Business users and Engineers that don't need the complexity of UNIX,
NT is very fast, very stable, and very well known.

For home users and gamers that don't know anything about serious
computing, Win95 is (IMHO) 10-20 TIMES more stable then MAC OS.  In
fact, the biggest trend in MACdom these days is something called
"Virtual PC", where PowerMacs and "PowerPC Macs" add a real
pentium-based addon card, so the MAC becomes a Jekyll/Hyde-brid MAC/PC.

Literally.  Then all these MAC users are loading Win95 to do the kind of
work everyone else in their office who have PCs can do.

Win95 is far more stable then MAC OS, and with equal configurations,
(disk size/type, RAM, CPU speed) a Win95 PC next to a MAC will a) boot
faster, b) run faster, c) do more, and actually allow you to run more
than 3 applications on the desktop without freezing.

MAC OS is a "single-threaded" system, in that you can't run "background"
at all in most cases.

Anyway, I find it rather ignorant to continually denegrate PC users,
-AND- MAC users, -AND- *a*n*y* kind of user who isn't using any
particular platform.

So, all you guys (and gals if you're out there) who feel GTK should
*only* be for Linux users, or only for "DEC Alpha" or any other single
environment, GROW UP --please--.

GTK (and GIMP) is an excellent system that is far more powerful than
it's origin implied.  (Look at GNOME and all the other cool things GTK
is making possible).  If it can be ported to improve life on Win95/NT,
or -even MAC-, then by ALL MEANS, PLEASE DO!

Don't run around putting down other folks for not being as brave as you
are to toss off the commercial OS shackles.  Help them improve their
situation by sharing your better tools, and ALL of us will be better
off.

Please leave your platform Politics and Prejudice at home.

__OK?__

> 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.

-- 
   Jim Harmon                           The Telephone Connection
jim@telecnnct.com                          Rockville, Maryland