Re: portability

From: Erick Gallesio <eg_at_saxo.essi.fr>
Date: Wed, 08 Jan 1997 20:54:50 +0100

> I wonder if anybody has taken advantage of Jay Krell's work on the Win32
> version of STk? I would like to count on STk being available for both the
> PC and Mac within a few years, and I hope I am not being naive.

I will try to integrate Jay's job for the next release. There are a lot
of great things and they should be in the standard release.

A Mac port would be a great thing however, as I have already said I cannot
access a Mac, so I will not do the port. BTW, experience shows that even if I
can access a Windows PC (my linux box ;-), it is hard to do good porting on
this platform because
        1) I know nearly nothing to Win32 (it tooks me several day to find
           how to make the Console window)
        2) I need to reboot the machine for the port and when in Win
           environnement, I feel a little bit "nude", since none of the
           tools I'm used to are on this platform
        3) I'm alone on STk, and when I work on windows I feel that
           I "lost" my time for STk (BTW, i was also surprised by the
           relative absence of interest of this port...)

So, I'm convinced that a good port can only be done by someone which use
dayly the system.

I said good port, because a simple port (such as the one I've done for
3.0) is relatively straight. In fact, the lines I have modified for
the windows port are very limited (~ 100 lines perhaps). Most of the works was
in making makefiles, correct include files...
I feel that someone which knows the system could have done the jone in a
couple of days. I suppose, but pehaps I'm wrong, that a port on MAc would take
something quite similar (I had compiled version 0.5 of snow on a Mac 3 or 4
years ago and things which could cause problem such as GC works well on this
patform). Doing a complete port with dynamic loading, correct file naming
conventions would probaly take longuer. How much? I don't know ...

> Tcl/Tk is
> already there, and the Visual C++ VC-Mac extension seems to claim that it
> can produce binaries for Win32, Mac, and Power Mac.

Never heard of a VC++ on Mac. Looks interesting.

> Erick, can you estimate the number of serious STk users and comment on
> the likelihood of a stable Mac port in the next 3 years?
> I am a Unix
> person and would be happy to ignore the Mac and say it's going away, but
> my anticipated users (in education) are heavily into Mac's and are likely
> to remain so.

Number of STk users: hard to say. The only objective number I can give you is
the number of people in the mailing list: 250, but this is not very
significative. A search of STk on altavista show pages speaking of STk whose
authors are NOT on the mailing list!!!
About the Mac in the 3 years? I suppose that a Linux port on the Mac will be
more stable that any Mac port of STk ;-)
But as I said before, I think that a simple port for Mac should be quite
simple, and it can be finely tuned as we have something running. For me, it
seems to be a good student project since they will be assured to have
something working quite rapidely and enhance it until the end of the project
period.
If someone is interested, I will of course try to help as much as possible.




                -- Erick
Received on Wed Jan 08 1997 - 20:55:56 CET