The Cross Plattform DWT

[Anders F Björklund]

doob wrote:

> Frank Benoit wrote:
>> doob schrieb:
>>> This is great news and I would be happy to help. I can help testing 
>>> both the linux and windows version. Any plans on an osx version?
>>
>> No plans for OSX for now. Doing this means to do the whole port again, 
>> because OSX will use the native widget from OSX and so its 
>> implementation is very different from the gtk/win.
>>
>> But, if you want to start this, you are welcome. I can assist with 
>> some swt specific knowledge and experience how to do the porting 
>> efficient.
> 
> I thought it was quite a big different between win and gtk and that it 
> also would about be that to osx.

One of the problems when doing native Mac OS X support for the
other two SWT ports (DWT/3.0 and Tioport/3.2) was interfacing
with the system headers for either of Carbon or Cocoa frameworks.

First was converting the headers to D (either all of it, or just
"extern" the snippets needed) and second was shipping this API
conversion in some format that doesn't violate Apple copyrights.

For SWT this is solved by a) using C so they can link directly
to the system headers by #include and b) getting Apple consent.
DWT would probably also have to solve both issues for Mac OS X ?

wxD works around this problem by using C++ to access the system
headers, and by not needing to ship any GUI system API interfaces.
And besides, it just uses the wxWidgets libraries to handle that...

--anders

PS. Same goes for the Code::Blocks support, which also uses C++.
     (i.e. instead of porting C::B over to D, it just extends it
     using C++ and the Squirrel scripting language for D support)

     Like http://wxd.sourceforge.net/wxd-codeblocks-wizard.png