[LispM-Hackers] Graphics questions

[James A. Crippen]

On Mon, 19 Mar 2001, Mike McDonald wrote:

> 
> >From: "James A. Crippen" <james@UnLambda.COM>
> >To: John Morrison <jm@mak.com>
> >Subject: Re: [LispM-Hackers] Graphics questions
> >Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2001 17:19:28 -0900 (AKST)
> >
> >I haven't read your message yet JM, but here's a link to a toolkit that
> >might be useful at least for the X and Windows ports.  I haven't looked at
> >it closely yet though.
> >
> >http://www.fltk.org/
> 
>   What on earth would you need a widget set for? Unless TI did major
> rewriting of the window system, all you're going to need to emulate a
> dumb frame buffer with draw pixel. I can't even imagine a need to
> scrollbar and pushbutton widgets. Personally, I'd say use Xlib to
> start with.

Primarily because programming in Xlib sucks, and secondly because we'll
hopefully have more than just a frame buffer blitting pixels, but an
actual user interface in which we can do things like configuring devices,
selecting bands to load, etc.

Most importantly Xlib isn't portable to anything but X.  If we use a
widget set that is portable to more than X *and* has a widget which
consists of a dumb frame buffer then we wouldn't have so much to deal with
in rewriting all the back-end graphics support cruft.

I'd like to experiment, but I'm not sure that writing in raw Xlib is a
good idea.  But we'll do what we have to...

'james

-- 
James A. Crippen <james@unlambda.com> ,-./-.  Anchorage, Alaska,
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