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

[Kenneth Albanowski <kjahds kjahds com>]

On Mon, 15 Jun 1998, Steve Hosgood wrote:

> 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.

And this is bad how? The simplest way to distinguish Open Source code is
that it can run _anywhere_...

> 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.

There's not much that is accurate here...

> 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.

Win32 programs (all Windows'95 programs, IOW) are premptively
multi-tasking, which is _exactly_ the same level of threading what X gives
you. (You musn't starve the Gtk/X event loop, any more then you should
starve the Windows message loop.) 

> 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?

Good grief, _yes_. Windows, back to 3.1, has had all of the memory
management features, virtual memory, swapping, demand loading, etc. MacOS
is the only existing OS that isn't "modern", in this sense. 

Please, skip the baseless insults, and just look at it as a technical
problem. A problem that has only been solved in one fashion: to allow it
to run under Windows (and MacOS), Tk includes an Xlib compatability layer. 
In theory this library could get Gtk running under Windows (and/or MacOS) 
in short order, assuming all the needed bits are present, which they might
not be.

If Gdk is ported, that'll give you working Gtk in quick order. The next
trick would be porting Gtk, so that native widgets can be used.

-- 
Kenneth Albanowski (kjahds@kjahds.com, CIS: 70705,126)