Re: using charles library

[rm@gunlab.com.ru (Roman V. Isaev)]

> >    Just start GVD on WinXX and go to preferences. Every tab is so 
> > jerky, they redraw themselves several times and it's quite visible. 
> > Most funny are Source and Data tabs, when you click them widgets 
> > run around like cockroaches before settling on their places. May be 
> > it's fixed in 2.2 but all I see is only 1.3 for win available for 
> > download. I'm not that brave to venture into compiling 2.0 on windoze 
> > and I see no 2.2 at all there at http://libre.act-europe.fr/GtkAda/ :)
> >    Sluggish Gtk behaviour makes applications look sloppy and low-quality.
> OK I think then perhaps it is an issue with the windows port of Gtk,
> because I don't see this in any of the following programs: gvd, gimp,
> galeon, gtop, gedit, glimmer, civclient-gtk, gnumeric, abiword, rox,
> gvim, glosa etc... on Linux. All use GTK+.

   Windows Gtk is horrible. But unix version feels laggy too, especially 
compared with programs written with Athena, wxWindows and even qt.
*sigh* I think we need a benchmark that measures time between action 
(i.e. button click or menu item select) and new window settling down,
i.e. no more changes to that window. Then benchmark every toolkit
creating new window from scratch with say 50 widgets and see who's faster
and by what margin...
 
> >    They didn't. If you want to use gettext you have to haul 
> > its dll on winXX and use -lintl on unix. They simply made binding 
> > for C gettext library (and no ada parser so far). 
> That's why I said you could look at making a binding.

   Yep, but what's the point of using Ada linking lots of C libraries, may
be it's easier to use C everywhere just to be uniform? :)

> >    I wrote tiny library that loads .mo files and translates text 
> > using table from that file as I played with Ada:
> Nice, but your Strings are they expecting UTF-8?

   .mo format has no indication wheter it UTF-8 or no. Just a translation
table for byte sequences. .po editors don't know about UTF-8 either, at 
least poEdit by Vaclav Slavik doesn't, another editor in X11 (on freebsd
if i remember correctly) did not too. If UTF-8 strings are kept in the same 
String type as usual strings then it's not a problem. If UTF-8 strings are 
kept in special string type than I have to know how to convert that type
into character sequence...

> > If anyone interested I can publish it (although code is crappy 
> > by any standard and doesn't handle errors well, it's my first 
> > experience with ada dammit). I don't like its dependency on charles 
> > library, gettext package should come alone (unless ada gets 
> > something like perl CPAN interface and autodownload of dependent 
> > libraries) or depend only on standard library (not GNAT 
> > specific). .mo files alredy come with precomputed hash, but 
> > I don't know Ada well enough to make this package work with 
> > hash yet :)
> Why not depend on charles? We need sooner or later to *pick* one
> container library so I don't she why charles should be it. When I have
> time I plan to look at it in order to use it in my applications.

   Because it's really annoying when you start using some library and it
requires another one, you go search for it the net only to find
it discontinued... and you are lucky if that old version is still 
available somewhere (i.e. you use want to some library and it depends 
on gd, but you find that gd author dropped gif support several years ago,
his site says basically "get lost if you want gif support" and this 
library have to work with gifs).

> >    Calculating oil well characteristics given certain pump, pipes,
> > fluid type and other 70+ parameters... but I'm afraid it might 
> > be faster to take all math and write anew than wade through 
> > fortran-like code, and I won't have enough spare time for either 
> > endeavour.
> But the calculations are still applicable?

   Yes. I translated these sources with the help of p2ada and obscene
language. Had to change some variable types and many procedure arguments
were used in calculations (not allowed in Ada, only if argument is marked 
as "out"). It works (delphi recompiled version works too). Probably turbo5
binary was throwing errors around because its runtime doesn't like XP "dos").
But as I said it's a question of maintainig this code and I can't do that 
because I don't know math that well and my father won't learn another 
language (he did not really learn pascal anyway) :)

   Found bugs in AdaGIDE while fiddling. It garbles cyrillic 
(windows-1251 encoding) text inside the selection when you press 
"comment" button and garbles cyrillic randomly when you simply work with
file -- change, compile, change, compile, everything looks fine until
suddenly you find some strings garbled and file overwritten :(