On Jan 31, 2011, at 2:35 PM, Devon McCormick wrote: > Any idea how hard it would be to build gtk equivalents of these basic > functions? Does this make sense, i.e. would it help cross-platform > portability?
The little time I've spent with the code revealed it couldn't just be recompiled for Mac-Intel. Most of these libraries should now be part of, or available as binary packages, for Linux. The image3 library elected to link with static libraries and object files, and there is a modified system of makefiles that build the open-source libraries, as well as image3. This might be a bit of a hindrance for re-building shared libraries that now use ./configure to execute correctly across various platforms. The linking to static libraries and object files is likely in most cases now unnecessary, and in the case of OSX, frowned upon by Apple. I'd assume that GTK and Cocoa/Carbon duplicate most of this functionality. Likely Windows is in the same state. The big decision would be whether it made more sense to dynamically link to a universe of shared (and perhaps slightly different) native libraries, or dynlink to a set of pre-built open-source shared (ie Linux/GTK) libraries, or cherry pick the object files from the open-source libs to assemble image3 as is currently done. As Mr. Iverson remarked, there would have to be several incarnations of the image3 library, and I certainly don't have the platforms and experience to do every one. Perhaps each major OS could choose to solve their revision however they choose? Although I'm grateful for the GTK system on OSX, I'd elect to make my efforts Mac-centric. HTH, Charles ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
