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Mail Archives: djgpp/1997/09/28/19:54:09

Date: Sun, 28 Sep 1997 19:00:05 +0200 (IST)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: Peter Palotas <blizzar AT hem1 DOT passagen DOT se>
cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: Mouse Cursors, GUI's.
In-Reply-To: <3.0.16.19970928113810.1c0f11e8@hem1.passagen.se>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.970928185926.423V-100000@is>
MIME-Version: 1.0

On Sun, 28 Sep 1997, Peter Palotas wrote:

> First problem is the mouse-pointer. How do you greate an absolutely
> flicker-free mouse-pointer? I mean, just look at windows. It doesn't
> flicker.

Huh?  Did you mean Microsoft Windows?  Because on my system (Windows
95), every time the DOS box scrolls a line, the mouse pointer
flickers.  I can stop the flickering by moving the pointer to the
caption bar, but even this not always works (the window title changes
when I run nested programs, like compilation with Make, and that's
whne the pointer flickers also).

> What you could have is a procedure looping, checking for events,
> this works, but then you can't do anything else in your program meanwhile,
> hence it leads to quite a lot of idle time.

Did you try this?  I think you greatly exaggerate the problems here,
maybe because it just seems ``ugly''.  FYI: the DJGPP port of Emacs
works by polling the mouse in exactly the way that you describe, and I
have yet to see the effect of the ``lots of idle time'' that you are
afraid of.  (IMHO, if the performance suits you, the polling method is
the most portable and the most safe; look at the amount of problems
that RHIDE and Allegro have when they try to do this much faster and
better.)

> You could use a
> multi-threading-library I suppose, but I don't know how stable these are,
> and so on. Wouldn't it be good if DJGPP implemented a version of
> fork()

As a matter of fact, there is an alpha version of a multi-threading
`fork' that was proposed to be added to the next release of DJGPP.
But it needs testing.  Would you consider testing it in your projects
and posting feedback, bugfixes etc.?  If so, please write to DJ Delorie
<dj AT delorie DOT com> and ask him to send you the code.  Thanks.

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