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

["Jason M. Felice" <jasonf baldwingroup com>]

Matt Kimball wrote:

> On Fri, May 01, 1998 at 10:50:45AM -0400, Jason M. Felice wrote:
> > I'd like to port GTK+ to Windows 95/NT for a few reasons.
> <snip>
> > libgdk may be almost a rewrite.  I'm prepared for this, though hoping it
> > isn't so.
> >
> > How much support have I got?
>
> You've got my support.  I think this would be a very important move
> for the free software community and I've been wanting to do this same
> thing for some time.  I've mentioned it on this list a few times
> before, with mixed reactions.
>
> Porting glib was an evening's work.  Porting gdk looks like it will
> require a from-scratch rewrite.  Once that is done, most of gtk can be
> used without changes.  One question though: port to mingw32 or Visual
> C++?  The former is in the spirit of the of the GTK+ community, and
> would let anyone develop without invensting in VC++.  On the other
> hand, VC++ is a much nicer development environment.  (One could get it
> to build under either, but that is a bit more work).

Well, I hadn't thought about that.  I was going to use VC5 by default.  The
other alternative was Cygnus' gnu-win32's gcc for iterem, although the final
code would need to compile under a 'native' Windows compiler.  In the gdk and
gtk directories, there are awk scripts and other scripts, so Cygnus' may be a
good idea to start with.  (Especially since autoconf and configure work
there.)  Cygnus works well on NT, but is DOG SLOW on 95, so that may be
limiting who could contribute.

Also, if I start with Cygnus, I could port the X11R6 client libraries and use
an X server under NT to get the thing to compile and run before making it
native.  The X11R6 client library header files have #ifdef WIN32 in them, so
I'm assuming it'll be little if not no work.

Hey, it'll probably be worthwhile to keep the X client code for when DISPLAY is
set to something other than ":0.0".

I've never heard of mingw32, what is it?

-Jay 'Eraserhead' Felice
jasonf@baldwingroup.com