Re: [gtk-list] Porting question

[Matt Kimball <mkimball xmission com>]

On Fri, Mar 27, 1998 at 12:32:58PM -0600, elan@jeeves.net wrote:
> Not to try to cause too much trouble, but I was wondering whether anyone
> has considered porting the GTK+ to other windowing systems besides X (e.g.
> Win32, BeOS, etc.)  

I have been thinking about this too.  (Specifically, I have been
wondering about BeOS and Win32 as well.  Great minds and all that,
eh?)

> It seems that it would be really nice to be able to use such awesome
> applications as The GIMP under other operating systems -- or perhaps
> this was never a goal of the GTK+?  In doing some initial thinking
> about it, it seemed that porting to a windowing system that provided
> most, if not all of the widgets in the GTK+ might be fairly easy,
> considering the Object-Oriented design of the toolkit.

Agreed, it would be very nice to have these apps.  However, I think
the porting of GTK+ apps might be an easier one if GTK+ maintained its
own look-and-feel rather than trying to match the native platform
look-and-feel.  (For instance, sizing Win32 buttons in the same way
that GTK+ buttons are sized when packed in HBox or VBox containers
would look a bit funny).

Maybe Raster's theming would help out.  (One could create a GTK+ theme
which closely matched the native L&F).  But I think might be good to
only rely on the drawing operations native to the platform, rather than 
native widgets.

This also means that only libgdk would need to be ported.  Most of
libgtk could be used as-is.

If anyone is interested in such a project, I'd be more than willing to
contribute.

Matt Kimball
mkimball@xmission.com