[lazarus] Portable lib

[Michael A. Hess]

Nicolas Aragon wrote:
> 
> First: if design is right, you don't have to touch the code in one
> part to correct or inprove the others. I know it doesn't sound too
> impressive as of now, but I hope a first sample would show it clearly.

I have to agree with this thought myself. It is one of the reasons I
wasn't to crazy about the Megido project. Now for the IDE I don't know
if it is really all that much of a concern as to whether it is portable
with other libraries. The FCL is where I think portability should be
addressed. I am a Gnome fan myself so I am on the gik+ bandwagon but you
can't deny the KDE Qt existence. There is alot of good software written
for that desktop and I am sure that there will be developers that will
want to write to that desktop using the widgets designed for it. For
that matter Gnome is written using gti+ plus but it has it's own set of
high level widgets that are based on gtk+ that Gnome developers would
want to use.
 
> Second: if you later add support for Xlib, text mode (both could be
> useful for installations programs), another OS'es...

Right. Linux isn't the only game in town. Solaris isn't going anywhere
anytime soon. I can see FPC being used on Solaris one day and they might
want a Motif interface.

> Third: it's clear that, this way, you don't have to recompile like
> you'd have to do with defines. But you could even change the
> underlying lib without re-linking. A program could check which library
> is available at run-time and dynamically link to it. The IDE itself
> could manage a number of different libraries.
> 
> Yes, it seems toooo far from the present, when we don't have one :-)
> But if it isn't done now, it will be very difficult to do it later.

Agreed we aren't there yet or even close to that aspect as far as I am
concerned. We also have to consider any problems that might arise out of
a Delphi copyright issue. So we don't need to rush into it.
 
> But just because this, I will like to finish a complete example of
> what I say. Then you could judge if it's acceptable to you. I don't
> want just to say "this is the right thing to do (C)", and less to you
> that have working code. If I propose an alternative, I want it to be
> ready to compile and offer to change actual code seamlessly.

I'll be very interested to see your example code when it is ready. Again
I don't know if we even need to worry about having to change the
existing code being used for the IDE development. We still need a good
GUI IDE for Linux for FPC so I'd rather see something built, anything
built which will speed up further development. After it is built and
running it will give us a good test application to slowy modify
components to a new format if needed.
 
> Hope you will slow down or I will be unable!! :)

Yeah! Are these guys greased lighting or what!

-- 
==== Programming my first best destiny! ====

Michael A. Hess      Miracle Concepts, Inc.
mhess at miraclec.com   http://www.miraclec.com