[Texmacs-dev] Re: Compiling TexMacs on OSX

[Abdelrazak Younes]

Henri Lesourd wrote:
> Abdelrazak Younes wrote:
>
> > In the case of Qt plugins the only thing to take care of is that the 
> > plugin are develop with a version lower or equal than the one with 
> > which TeXmacs was compiled, that's all.
> That's the job of the plugin implementor, not ours.

Well, please let me say that sorry but, even if TeXmacs is very good, I 
don't think you'll get a lot of external plugin implementors if any. For 
this to happen you'll have to gain a lot of market share (which I don't 
see happening in the foresable future). So, if someone really is 
interested in adding a feature to TeXmacs, I'll bet it's just easier to 
try to put in there directly.

> > So, if this is the only reason for the glue library, I don't see a 
> > very big added value.
> The added value is that people can develop new widgets
> independently, and load these widgets inside TeXmacs
> *without the need of recompiling TeXmacs*.

You can do that with C++, I am 100% sure of this.

> Thus the mechanism is 100% dynamic, and without a glue
> library which exports only a C API, it would not be
> possible to do things this way (otherwise, recompiling
> TeXmacs from source would be required each time you
> modify your plugins).

I still don't buy this argument, the C++ ABI has been stable for a 
number of years already and many C++ applications support old plugins 
without problem. Provided that you don't change the API the plugins 
should continue to run just fine if TeXmacs is upgraded.

Abdel.