On Thursday July 09, 2009 5:32 PM Chris Robinson wrote:
With the same argument you could say that writing COM objects has to be done in C++. Yet Wine has lots and lots of COM code written all in standard C.
It has to, because the class vtable layout and calling convention can be different in Windows than how the host system's compiler will generate
it.
COM objects have to interface with existing Windows code, and so need to be setup in memory in a specific way.
Not entirely sure where your "It has too" is pointed at. If it is about COM code being written in C then it is not entirly true. All the MS examples about COM nowadays are completely in C++ and some newer API headers seem to not even include the C part. But of course that code is meant to be compiled with Visual C++ and I could see trouble trying to get the exact binary layout with gcc. This is maybe not such a problem with newest gcc but was certainly a problem with older versions.
If OSX will always have Obj-C support, and the Obj-C code can be restricted to OSX-only code, then the only sticking point, in my eyes, would be how maintainable it is. After all, if only one or two people can work with Obj-C code, it can bit-rot that much more quickly.
I think this is in fact the major issue here. There is certainly interest in starting such a project but maintaining it is a completely different beast.
Rolf Kalbermatter
Rolf Kalbermatter wrote:
On Thursday July 09, 2009 5:32 PM Chris Robinson wrote:
If OSX will always have Obj-C support, and the Obj-C code can be restricted to OSX-only code, then the only sticking point, in my eyes, would be how maintainable it is. After all, if only one or two people can work with Obj-C code, it can bit-rot that much more quickly.
I think this is in fact the major issue here. There is certainly interest in starting such a project but maintaining it is a completely different beast.
This may be AJ's major concern. I don't know of many Obj-C programmers on this project.
James McKenzie
On Sun, Jul 12, 2009 at 2:06 AM, James McKenziejjmckenzie51@earthlink.net wrote:
Rolf Kalbermatter wrote:
On Thursday July 09, 2009 5:32 PM Chris Robinson wrote:
If OSX will always have Obj-C support, and the Obj-C code can be restricted to OSX-only code, then the only sticking point, in my eyes, would be how maintainable it is. After all, if only one or two people can work with Obj-C code, it can bit-rot that much more quickly.
I think this is in fact the major issue here. There is certainly interest in starting such a project but maintaining it is a completely different beast.
This may be AJ's major concern. I don't know of many Obj-C programmers on this project.
James McKenzie
Just something else. I think that the amount of obj-c code could be limited if we delegate as much of the work we can to OpenGL. That way we directly have a modern GPU accelerated GDI renderer like on Windows7. Yes perhaps older Intel Macs don't have great OpenGL drivers but I wouldn't consider that an issue as they could still use X11. I think that mostly we need OSX-code for window management and input (keyboard/mouse).
Even in Winex11 we aren't that far away from switching to OpenGL. Right now I'm adding more XRender acceleration but the same (and even much more) can be done using OpenGL. In case of Winex11 we could use GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap and render stuff for which OpenGL isn't suited to a pixmap and then blit it using a texture.
Roderick