The Icon Bar: The Playpen: The whole porting thing...
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The whole porting thing... |
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MikeCarter (20:04 14/9/2006)
Phlamethrower (20:20 14/9/2006)
jmb (20:31 14/9/2006)
jmb (21:35 14/9/2006)
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Mike |
Message #80174, posted by MikeCarter at 20:04, 14/9/2006 |
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After seeing Monkeysons post [in the Fresco thread] on porting is it realy worth porting? It apears more effort has to be put into porting that writing a program from scratch.
Thats my view anyway.
[Edited by MikeCarter at 20:05, 14/9/2006] |
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Jeffrey Lee |
Message #80181, posted by Phlamethrower at 20:20, 14/9/2006, in reply to message #80174 |
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Depends on the program.
For command line tools, I'm happy with using ports, and ports are often easy to produce.
But for GUI apps things get a lot more complicated, and even if porting GUI apps was easy (and they had decent performance compared to a native implementation) I'd still rather see GUI apps developed from scratch for RISC OS (To keep them consistent with the RISC OS look & feel, etc.)
And I should say that ports of command line apps are often easy to produce because of the great work that's gone into UnixLib & GCCSDK, despite the neverending filename translation problems and the fact they provide incentives to port software instead of write from scratch 
[Edited by Phlamethrower at 20:25, 14/9/2006] |
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JMB |
Message #80186, posted by jmb at 20:31, 14/9/2006, in reply to message #80181 |
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There's also the case of hybrids (such as NetSurf) which utilise a number of libraries that were originally written for other platforms to do various things but do the vast majority of the work themselves (along with having a native UI).
It's worth pointing out that some of the libraries that the NetSurf team developed in order to make their lives easier are being used by a number of other bits of RO software (including ChoX11 and hence the Firefox port). All of which means that there's the beginnings of some sensible cooperation between different RO-related projects, even if the OS developers aren't cooperating. |
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JMB |
Message #80190, posted by jmb at 21:35, 14/9/2006, in reply to message #80186 |
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One other thing which I didn't state explicitly (but should have been self-evident) is that things developed by the GCCSDK team have also made the NetSurf developers' lives easier, so the cooperation goes both ways. |
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The Icon Bar: The Playpen: The whole porting thing... |
