Re: [Adonthell-devel] Redesign?

[Kai Sterker]

Am Sonntag, 17.08.03 um 15:07 Uhr schrieb Alexandre Courbot:

> I fear I haven't understood everything from your mail. Can you give a 
> short
> example of what would work and what wouldn't on OSX? From your mail,
> gfx::init would never return because it runs the apps main loop?

Yeah. That's because the OSX gui is running a loop of it's own. So our 
loop would have to run inside that. The OSX gui has to be initialized 
when loading the sdl gfx backend, so that it is available for any 
programs and scripts that use it. But since the OSX gui will never 
return, once initialized, we have to "jump" out of it somehow. That's 
why I suggested to run our main loop inside that of OSX. Which means it 
would have to be started from the gfx library.

Quite messy, I know. That's why fixing SDL might be a better approach:

> What seems weird is that SDL is supposed to make any decently written 
> program
> run on all the supported platforms. Maybe there are some weaknesses in 
> the
> OSX port? If this is the case, I'd rather look at fixing SDL - Sam 
> Latinga is
> never reluctant to include external patches. And I wonder whether your 
> fix
> would still work fine with Python programs, for instance.

Well, I could have a closer look at SDL first. However, as far as I 
know, this isn't an OSX specific problem. Something similar will happen 
on Win32 too, I think. It's a bit like GTK programming. At some point 
you'll have to do a gtk_main (argc, argv) and from there you never 
return until you close the app. Execution itself continues at some 
other place, usually after the user triggers some events by pressing 
buttons and such.

That is basically what happens with the OSX GUI. SDL uses that 
mechanism I described: the application's main function is replaced by 
one that SDL provides. In there, all platform specific initialization 
of the GUI takes place and then the applications actual main method is 
invoked from inside the main loop of the GUI.

I hope it's clearer now.


> All in all, there seem to be very little Adonthell activity these 
> days. We
> didn't have a meeting yet - maybe we could plan that later this year.

So I'm not the only one still thinking about the meeting ;). Yeah, we 
should try to get something sorted out for later this year. Or early 
next year, perhaps.

Kai