Mail Archives: djgpp/1998/04/29/03:46:54
On Tue, 28 Apr 1998, Bill Currie wrote:
> I found that porting from GRX to Allegro wasn't *too* painfull, and I
> imagine a GRX<->Allegro layer wouldn't be too hard to implement (I'm
> *not* volunteering, I've got other things going).
Personally, I think X emulation should *not* use Allegro as its
underlying engine. IMHO, Allegro messes with the hardware too much,
and this has some annoying implications in some cases. Programs which
use Allegro will not work on some platforms supported by DJGPP; even
on Windows 95 they sometimes are in conflict with the OS. This is
IMHO a bad thing for a general-purpose library such as Xlib.
Allegro is meant for writing programs such as games, which cannot be
written without accessing the hardware. Xlib is not such an
application; there's nothing bad in having response to a mouse click
or a keypress delayed a bit in the context of X. So I won't advise
using Allegro for porting Xlibemu to DJGPP v2.
But since I'm not volunteering either, this is not my decision.
> GRX crashed under me alot under certain circumstances
GRX is still actively maintained. Maybe these bugs are solved by now,
and if not, maybe they can be solved in the near future.
FWIW, I don't even think Xlibemu needs a mouse handler; it might get
away by reading the mouse using Int 33h (Emacs works this way, and I
have yet to see it crash). You have to realize that Xlib works with
the keyboard and the mouse by converting their clicks into a stream of
events. If you can handle them in a way that preserves the order of
these events in the stream, you don't need to worry about fast
response to each event.
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