Re: building/running on cygwin?

[Arnaud Charlet]

> No I promise that was my last post about ADA  :-)

Fine, that was probably off topic for this list ;-)
(Btw, Ada is a firstname, not a acronym, so it is not uppercased usually ;-)

> To turn your question about GVD around,  I wondered what is your opinion
> about using a portable GUI library to implement the ddd user interfaces ?

Andreas have already been asked this question many times I think.
Actually before implementing GVD we looked very closely at DDD, we even
started making changes to support Ada properly.

After this investigation and our knowledge of DDD's internals, we came to the
conclusion that changing the graphical toolkit, and making other enhancements
such as multiprocess support and other things would require more work than
to restart from scratch.

And well, restarting from scratch can be fun, since you do not have any
constaint then ;-)

GVD is certainly not a finished product yet, but we've only put a few monthes
of work in it so far, so that's expected.

> I know there is a GUI library called wxwindows (www.wxwindows.org) available
> that is supposed to run on Unix/X/Motif as well as u$ Windows.   Do you have
> any idea how much work it would be to refactor ddd to use this ?  It would
> very likely improve the performance under NT,  I don't know what the
> implications under Unix would be.  Apparently Wxwindows also works on the
> Mac so it would give a free port to that too if it's of any interest.

We are using GtkAda, the Ada binding for Gtk+. I don't have much experience
with the C++ bindings of Gtk+, so I can't really comment, though you can also
use the plain C Gtk+ library. I don't know the state of wxwindows, and whether
it is actively maintained or not.
The advantage of Gtk is that this is the preferred GUI toolkit for free
software development. Its windows port is not (yet) at the same level as the
X port, but we've found it very usable under windows.
Speaking of performance, I have not used DDD under windows much, so I can't
compare it with unix ports. The only feedback I have received from users
of DDD and GVD under unix is that GVD is significantly faster. But again, I
can't comment much on that, since I have not done the comparison myself.

Arno