Re: AdaGames

["Kent Paul Dolan" <xanthian@well.com>]

"Preben Randhol" <randhol+abuse@pvv.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 28 Mar 2002 16:00:18 -0000, chris.danx wrote:

> > I think David Botton was looking for volunteers to port gwindows to Linux a
> > while ago, although I'm not entirely sure.  If you want to have an
> > alternative to gwindows perhaps you could contribute to this effort.

> But what should be the underlying library one should use? Raw xlib?

No, you need to go sideways to that; xlib is X specific, and you are
wasting your time completely if you don't write something that ports
automatically to any windowing system.  The Graphical Kernel System
would be nice, because under it there is surely code to call xlib
available somewhere; xlib becomes just another a device driver from the
GKS point of view.

Java is an alternative, but only once you have full source compiler
technology widely in place to overcome Java's rather horrific
performance problems.

To give you an idea, a huge commercial graphics package (DISPLA and
TELL-A-GRAPH) was ported to GKS (so the president of the company told an
audience of which I was part) by using only the GKS "draw absolute line"
command; it doesn't have to be that big a deal, it is just necessary to
have that standard interface somewhere in your graphics stream to make
portability work.

I've never seen a full PHIGS implementation, so I don't know if the
Programmers' Hierarchical Interface to Graphical Systems died or is
still viable, but GKS and its companion standards are still in use
twenty years later.

xanthian.



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