[RE: [Re: [lazarus] How are we going to store component data?]]

[Jeffrey A. Wormsley]

>This will not work for TBitmaps and so on. How will you specify the bitmap
>in pascal code ???

A constant array?  Same for any other data such as audio, but I assume
there may be limits on how big these structures can be.  Or, I suppose, it
may be possible to link in raw binary data directly into the executable.  I
used to do this a long time ago in TP.  I would build my screens in an
editor that saved its data in the same format as the text video memory
(character attribute / character pairs) then save it to disk.  I would then
run a bin2obj utility, and declare a variable that used the external
directive (I think, it may have been a procedure, just one you couldn't
call!) and link the obj file into the exe.  The code accessed the data
through the pointer to this data and simply copied the screen from code
space directly into video memory.  It was extremely fast, much faster than
drawing the screen in code.  I'll have to dig up some of those old prjects
tomorrow and see how much of that technique could be applicable here.

>I think we should make some resource compiler after all. We'll need it
>anyhow. On windows we can simply use Windows resources; on other platforms
>we can do something else.

Is there anything inherent in a linux executable that would preclude using
the windows style resource information?  I would assume that it would be
easier to adapt the windows scheme to linux than develop a new scheme from
scratch.  Not that the way windows does it is the best, but I can see some
advantages.  For one, the resource files that are -not- managed by the ide
would be identical for both platforms, and would require no conversion when
migrating Delphi code.

Just thoughts,
  Jeff.