Re: [Sheflug] Re: TopPage info for Sheffield Linux User Group

[Al Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Sat, 20 May 2000, Will Newton wrote:

> What bugs me is that it IS possible to write portable, modular code that
> requires only a minimal amount of porting.

.. assuming all platforms give equivilent services, hence wxWindows, etc.

> #ifdefs are not necessarily the
> devil.

I'm afraid I don't agree with that ;))) 

> Things like NSPR just infuriate me. Several megabytes of
> wrappers. Ugly as sin.

Again, I don't agree. There are no other ways of doing some things.
Threads? POSIX doesn't help; most implementations have different ways of
doing things. Even Linux doesn't do POSIX threads. Another example is
Simple Directmedia Layer. I promise you, if people are writing games using
this technique, performance is *not* an issue ;) 

> Wine just takes the cruft to a new level.

I've still yet to hear an argument that Wine adds significatly more than,
say, GTK, Mesa, etc...

> Abstract your GUI code, abstract your sound code, write the rest in ANSI
> C.

If it was that easy, people would do it. People don't. You can't just
'abstract' GUI code. How do you interact with the GUI? Do you need to
provide a call-back function? When do you need to repaint the window? How
many mouse buttons are available? How many screens? Do I have control over
screen display depth? Can I write directly to a framebuffer? There's *so*
much variation, it's not something you can do anything about. This is one
of the reasons Wine is often slow: people run it in X, thinking that X's
performance is on a par with Windows. It's isn't; X is hopelessly
inefficient for local apps. Run Wine over X/DGA, and the speed *is*
equivilent.

> Wine is simply for "afterthought" ports by bad programmers.

Why should people bother re-writing old code when it functions as well
when you port it using Winelib? And you get a native Linux binary at the
end? If you're writing NEW programs, that's different, but people don't
just rewrite the codebase just to have a clean port. It takes too long -
ask the Mozilla people.

Cheers,

Alex.


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