Re: Some questions about GNUStep

[Jamie Ramone]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 6:52 PM, Philippe Laporte
<address@hidden> wrote:
>
>
> Jamie Ramone wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 2:29 PM, Philippe Laporte
> <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>
> Hi all,
>
> In order to figure out how to best contribute to the development efforts, I
> have a few questions:
>
> How far are you for MAC OS X 10.5 level support in the AppKit?
>
> Has anyone started retargeting to other than X11 for Linux, like SDL?
>
>
> Yes, I'm building a GNUstep-specific windowing server whose (included)
> screen drawing, keyboard and handling modules are SDL based.
>
>
> What is a GNUStep-specific Windowing Server? What is GNUStep-specific?

That means it's written both with GNUstep in mind as the toolkit of
choice (until a new one is created) for creating apps with a
consistent look and feel, and USING GNUstep to do it.

I'm using GNUstep to write the most of the skeletal parts, especially
the application communication facillities (through DO), and plain C
for things like the ADTs (such as the main window database and
depth-ordering list). The idea is that when using this server, you
HAVE to use GNUstep as it's completly incompatible with X. As a bonus,
if my server catches on, it'll boost GNUstep's popularity.

> Have you thought of using OpenGL instead of SDL for the drawing?

I prefer SDL, I only need 2D capability. OpenGL has WAY too much stuff
I'll probably never use and I would have to learn it's API. SDL is
small and I'm already familliar with it. So as you can see, using with
it cuts the developement time drastically ;-)
SDL also works on MS Windows, OS X and X Windows, as well as from the
Linux console. In my experience, it works so-so on X Windows,
pathetically on Windows (yes, yes, I know that's MS' fault) and don't
know on OS X. So I'll stick to my guns.

That being said, it'll be a ) freedomware and b ) easily extensible.
So there's no reason OpenGL couldn't be used down the road. In my
view, being OpenGL mainly a 3D modeling library and the software
backend is the only consistent one across platforms (OK, OK, Quake is
my criteria, so sue me!), it only makes sense to use something like
SDL for the server's backend and OpenGL for some thing like the 3DKit,
and let it either access the hardware directly with some coordination
thith the server wia InterceptorKit (yet to come) or using the
software backend which would use the server itself.

Hope that clears any doubt.

> Thanks,
> Philippe Laporte
>

-- 
Besos, abrazos, confeti y aplausos.
Jamie Ramone
"El Vikingo"