Re: ANN: Ada industrial control widget library v1.0 released

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Tue, 15 Feb 2011 11:02:33 +0100, Alex R. Mosteo wrote:

> ... and I always envy your 
> documentation webpages. Are they automatically generated from source?

No, manually. When I write documentation I always find lots of errors and
inconsistencies in the design and interfaces. So I consider hand-written
documentation important, at least to me.

> I wonder how much overhead (in terms of noticeable CPU use or user perceived 
> lag) would an abstract Ada intermediate layer would add to this kind of 
> library, in order to make the backend switchable. I have done so for my 
> (very limited) presentation needs, so in my case it is not an issue, but 
> when I see such a nice widget library I wonder if it could be made usable 
> not only with GTK (even if with some sacrifices).

What backend do you have in mind? And, more importantly, what kind of
design "of switching." I.e. is it basically porting GTK/GDK/Cairo to some
low-level graphical/OS framework like Windows or X11. Or is it porting the
application level library from GTK to something else (e.g. Qt). The former
is quite doable, but remains GTK. The latter is very difficult to estimate,
but I guess as very difficult. Each move up away from raw rendering towards
the application layer makes things more and more complicated.

BTW, this is one of the reasons I always wanted we had a purely Ada
low/middle level graphic library, rather than GTK or Qt.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de