Re: [gtk-list] Windows NT port of GTK+

[robert havoc pennington <rhpennin midway uchicago edu>]

On Fri, 1 May 1998, Jason M. Felice wrote:
> Hello, I'm a new subscriber.
> 
> I'd like to port GTK+ to Windows 95/NT for a few reasons.
> 1) Promote mozilla to use GTK+ for it's GUI.
> Meaning:
>     a) Possible GNOME port of communicator?  Probably not, but I hope
> so.
>     b) Cross platform mozilla HTML viewing widget.  Cha-ching.

There's already a Gnome port going on, and from discussion on the Mozilla
mailing list there is no way in heck Netscape will ever switch to a
cross-platform toolkit for the Windows version.

> 2) So I can write a freakin' GUI app and not worry about the hairy Linux
> -> Win32 or
> Win32 -> Linux port.
> 
> I realize there are other alternatives, (wxWidgets), but I'm very fond
> of GTK+.
> 

Well, good luck. gdk seems to let Xlib do most of the work, so Xlib is
what you're really porting... I have to admit I don't see how this is
going to work, since Windows and X just behave differently sometimes, and
gdk doesn't have a cross-platform abstraction of any kind... will Windows
people want to use something that doesn't look like Windows? Will a port
to Windows 98 even matter by the time you finish this thing?

It might be nice to have a Windows port *now*, but realistically you're
going to have it in a year or two or more - why not work on bringing Gnome
up to speed and *replacing* windows, or bite the bullet and write a useful
app with WxWindows (which many people do seem to like, I haven't tried
it)?

Or wouldn't it be easier to either write an X server for Windows, then run
Gtk+ natively; or work on a Windows side to Harmony, the free clone of Qt? 
(right now I don't think they're planning a Windows port.) 

Realize also that probably no existing Gtk apps are going to run on
Windows, at least not without a Unix emulation layer; they pretty much
depend on a POSIX system underneath the GUI. So even when you finish the
port, you still have to port all the apps. (This rules out Visual C++ by
the way, you are going to have to use the Cygnus Unix-emulation
environment; and then only GPL apps can be written I hear - so no Mozilla,
for example.) 

I don't mean to be discouraging, but it sounds like you're going to do a
lot of work, with few people helping you (I'm predicting), for very little
gain. (some non-native-L&F Win32 apps sometime far in the future.)

IMHO there are better things to do with your time. But you could prove me
wrong.:)

Havoc Pennington
http://pobox.com/~hp