Thoughts for development from a lurker

"G–ran" Hultgren gohu at rocketmail.com
Thu Oct 8 09:38:36 UTC 1998


Hi everybody!

Lots of opinions here, fun!

---Dwight Hughes <dwighth at ipa.net> wrote:
> To me, Squeak's UI and how it appears at present is a nonissue.
Squeak's
> color BitBlt display primitives can display just about anything one
can
> dream up. Why would you want to just emulate another GUI, or worse,
tie
> yourself to an external (functionally opaque) UI API, however nice it
> might be? Squeak's potential to become whatever one can imagine (on
> almost any platform) is too important to cripple this way.

Yes, definitely agree. It is what has made Squeak so successfully
ported among other things.
 
> A good foreign function interface (with perhaps some automatic header
> parsing and automatic generation of Squeak interface code and classes)
> would be a *great* thing to have, and it would make much of what you
are
> wanting possible, along with a lot more. But I do not think the
primary
> Squeak distribution should be saddled with any external UI, no matter
> how wonderful.

Agree also. It would definitely slow the evolution of Squeak down. I
was thinking more in lines of an additional package which in some
ingenious way could be hooked in "beneath" the Squeaky UI, and in NO
WAY replace the Squeaky UI.

[SNIP]
> As always -- if you want it, go do it. Squeak can be made to be
whatever
> you want it to be. If you want more window dressing, create it.

Yes, unfortunately I do not think I will have the time to dig in, too
many other projects going on, but I was just trying to put my finger
on stuff that I as an "outsider" consider to be the largest obstacles
for me to be able to use Squeak for DOING stuff and not just playing
around.

Of course Squeak is a research project but it would almost certainly
benefit the project if people actually USE Squeak to produce stuff
too... Right? :-)
 
> [There was an excellent post a bit back about the (largely unpleasant)
> experience of converting Squeak to use native GUI widgets and windows.
> If I can locate it I'll add it to this thread for a bit of
perspective.]
> 
> -- Dwight

Aha. Yes, I also vaguely remember something about this. Perhaps it
just is "too tricky" to put the stuff in "beneath" and the more
straight forward "make a bunch of classes that do foreign function
calling" way of doing it would be better. What do I know! :-)

regards, G–ran

===
G–ran Hultgren   | goran.hultgren at inspire.se | OO Consulting
Inspire          | Hem: +46 8 54022950       | http://www.inspire.se
Karlav”gen 18    | Mobil: +46 708 813936     | icq#:6136722
114 31 Stockholm | "Vi g–r allt m–jligt"


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