Hi!
I just want to let you know that I've been in contact with the guy
behind XTL and he's interested in making XTL portable enough for use
with LyX. I even went as far to send him some patches, and subscribe
to the mailing list.
For those who do not know, XTL is a small library for serialization
of data structures. Check the Freshmeat entry to learn more. I can
only recommend it as an exercise in what is possible with modern C++.
I've used it for a few things and can only say that it rocks your
socks off. I think this is exactly what we need for the communication
layer in the GUI indep-work. It's clean, fast, and very elegant
if you ask me.
Regarding how to realize this goal: I'm wondering if we should try a
small experiment after 1.1.5 is out: Include the latest XTL in the
building step, and then apply the usual routine to work out what
needs to be done to make the thing build on the various platforms.
We have a pretty effective and knowledgable group of testers on all
kinds of platforms associated with LyX, and this is exactly what is
needed for XTL to become truly portable. (For the moment, it's tied
pretty closely to gcc, but the author is working to address this.
A new release should be out shortly, once he gets all the patches
sorted out.)
The thing is that XTL requires a fairly advanced C++ compiler to work
completely. (However, we can use a less ambitious subset of the system
with older compilers, and that is still a nice solution. I know, because
I had to do that in order to make it work with Visual C++.)
Greets,
Asger
