On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 4:25 PM, Daniel Goldman <dgold...@ehdp.com> wrote: > Could you explain a little what SDL is, advantages, disadvantages? Sorry for > my ignorance. Daniel
SDL is a graphics library that has been ported to several platforms. PDCurses already has support for SDL 1.2.x built in. However, around 2012 the SDL developers completely rewrote the library and the new versions (SDL 2.x) are not backward compatible with the older ones. SDL2 works on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BSD, iOS and Android. You can build SDL2 on Linux to work with X or DirectFB (if you want to avoid X). There's also support in the works for Wayland on Linux. Also noticed, SDL2 has some support for clipboard functionality. Will be interesting to see how that works with PDCurses and how well applications might be able to share the clipboard. The main advantage of using SDL 1.2.x or SDL2 as a back-end for PDCurses is portability which is what I'm most interested in. I have seen a few applications combine SDL's graphics drawing capabilities with a PDCurses text based GUI. I hope to look into using something like that with some development I'm doing. Bill Gray wrote: >Win32a is still useful to me -- I still write some Windows >code, and Win32a code runs well using Wine, so it's actually a >cross-platform solution, at least for the Linux and OS/X desktops >-- but yours might be a nice alternative. Bill, I really like your Win32a code. However, I do a lot of cross-platform work and Wine seems like a lot of overhead to get a simple application running on a Linux or BSD system. Nano-X has some Win32 support, so it might be possible to get the Win32a version working with it. The nice thing is, as long as one sticks to the basic curses API, it should be fairly easy to port applications to whichever version of PDcurses or even ncurses someone wants to use. I'm just getting starting with the SDL 2.x port of PDCurses and I have some work to do before I'm satisfied with the port and ready to share the code somewhere. However, now would definitely be a good time if anyone has any input on design issues. I'm keeping all the SDL 1.2.x code and adding the SDL 2.x code based on the preprocessor condition (SDL_VERSION_ATLEAST(2, 0, 0)). As mentioned, I'm looking at using the SDL2 clipboard functionality instead of the internal clipboard used with SDL 1.2.x. I'm also experimenting with SDL2_TTF support instead of a bitmap font. Still looking into if/how best to support Unicode/UTF-8 and any suggestions in that area would be appreciated. Mark Hessling wrote: >I started my own port about 6 months ago, but other higher priority things got >in the way and I didn't get very far :-( If you have any useful tips or ideas from the port you started, please let me know. When I have something I feel is stable and well tested, I'll be sure to post here about it. Thanks. Sincerely, Laura http://www.distasis.com/cpp
