[ooc-compiler] OOC GUI development for Windows (was: Problems with OOC under Cygwin 1.1.2)

[Stewart G. <gre...@mu...>]

"Griebling, Michael" wrote:
 
> Thanks for the great work Stewart!  I'll have a look at
> trying this out.

Good luck! Let me know how it works (or doesn't as the case may be).
I've found oo2c to be quite stable under Cygwin / Windows NT, but have
not tested it under any other kind of Windows.

  How's the GUI interface to Windows
> coming along?

I'm afraid I can't take much credit for that as Tim has done all the
work of porting Visual Oberon to Windows.

For those of us interested in doing GUI work with OOC/Win32 there are
probably three options:

1) Use the raw Win32 interface. I've done a little low-level work with
this and it seems to work fine. There is a version of the WinApi module
available on Tim's site for use with VO/Windows. I have a somewhat newer
version translated from the Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 include files.

2) Use Visual Oberon / Windows. I don't yet have much experience with VO
but what I've seen looks very promising.

3) Use GTK. I did a rough translation of GTK 1.3 for Bernhard Treutwein,
who is interested to use it for porting Blackbox to Linux. Bernhard got
some toy GTK programs running under Windows using Blackbox. I know
nothing about GTK programming, so I haven't been able to test it myself
other than to verify that the Oberon-2 interface module compiles with
oo2c.

Although GTK looks viable as a cross-platform GUI, I have a few
reservations about using it. 
- The Win32 port is experimental, although it works well enough to run
the GIMP. 
- GTK has its own object model which is based on C. I'm not sure how
well Oberon-2 objects can be fitted into their object/callback system. I
imagine that coding new widgets would be far cleaner under VO. GTK
probably has a more complete set of its own widgets. 
- The GTK DLLs are rather large: about 2 megabytes in total. Its
probably no worse than MFC, but its still big.
- GTK is also fairly unstable in that it is developing fast (on all
platforms). The Win32 port is based on 1.3, but most Linux distributions
seem to still work with 1.2. This might make it hard to track changes in
the interfaces.

Having said that, anyone who is interested is welcome to look at the
files which are included in the distribution of H2O, my experimental C
to Oberon-2 translator. Look under the subdirectory "h2o/interfaces" for
"WinApi" or "libgtk". I haven't released this yet because it is
undocumented and is still a bit unstable. If it works (or not) I'd be
interested to know, but I'm currently too busy to be able fix any
problems with it.

  http://espc22.murdoch.edu.au/~stewart/files/h2o20000801.tar.gz

Cheers,
  Stewart