[Lazarus] fpGUI + SDL versus Lazarus + SDL -- pros and cons

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

Hi,

> Can fpGUI *currently* be used with (JEDI-)SDL?

You can use pretty much any library with fpGUI, just like you can with
any FPC based application. What the fpGUI+SDL discussion was about, is
the various backends fpGUI supports for drawing its widgets. Currently
fpGUI talks to X11 (under Linux/*BSD) and GDI (under Windows/WinCE) to
get window management and painting API's. The SDL discussion was about
extending the fpGUI code with a new SDL backend - where SDL does the
painting of widgets, forms etc.

I believe what you are referring to is the following:
fpGUI, just like LCL, can also supply a painting canvas to libraries
like Cairo, OpenGL, SDL etc to draw onto. This is currently possible
without difficulty. In fact, I have already seen a few fpGUI apps using
Cairo and SDL canvas's to do some painting - the main app is standard
fpGUI widgets using X11 or GDI, and then some window or widget contains
the Cairo or SDL painting output.


> What is the difference between using fpGUI with SDL and Lazarus with SDL?

No difference.


> Does the fpGUI + SDL create smaller binaries (on linux) versus Lazarus +
> SDL? Or are the other pros and cons?

Overall fpGUI application do have smaller binaries than Lazarus apps,
irrespective if they use SDL or not.



Regards,
  - Graeme -

-- 
fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal
http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/