RE: wxLua on OS X?

["Vijay Aswadhati" <wyseman@...>]

<snip/>
> When I looked at Fox it wasn't working on as many platforms, 
> or has such a large useful widget set as WX. 

True. I am not sure if we both looked at it during the same 
time period. Lately, however it does have a very nice set of
widgets; the number of users are slowly growing and finally
the author is doing a great job by way of support offered 
via the newsgroup.

> Wouldn't SWT require a Java  VM install?

Not the way I plan on porting it to Lua. Read on...

> Do you mean AWT or SWT - as it's from Eclipse?

I meant SWT and yes it is from IBM's Eclipse project.

> AWT uses native non-portable widgets.
Hmmm. But I am not planning on porting AWT.

The understanding I have is from looking at the source 
code and by reading articles that talk about the design
and motivation of SWT <http://www.eclipse.org/articles/index.html>

SWT differs significantly from the approach taken by Sun. The
approach taken by the Eclipse team is to split the toolkit
into three layers:
 - Documented platform independent GUI object model (a.k.a SWT)
   that is written in Java. [L1]
   
 - An internal platform specific adaptation layer that is also
   written in Java. [L2]*N Where N is the number of platforms.

 - A native platform specific bridge layer that is written in "C"
   and bridges the internal platform specific Java adaptation layer
   to the OS supported GUI system calls. [L3]*N Where N is the 
   number of platforms.


What I am contemplating on is the following:
 - The native platform specific bridge layer written in "C" looks 
   "very" clean. This layer [L3] needs to be converted to Lua "C".
   Labor intensive yes, but nothing that cannot be mapped to Lua 
   "C" API (as a first approximation). This has to be done for
   all N
   
 - Port the entire Java code [L1] to Lua. This is to be done only
   once.

 - Port the [L2] for all N.


That was the scoop and that also explains my earlier post requesting
a sample for "differential inheritance".

Since Lua is faster than Java (metrics obtained from the "Great Language
Shootout"), I am thinking this should work. But then I could be overlooking
something. However I do believe that having a widget toolkit that was built
for Lua from the ground up would bring in a new wave of fans to Lua just 
as Tcl/Tk (which by the way is my definition of an ideal marriage)
did during its sunshine days.  

Comments and feedback are welcome.

-- Vijay Aswadhati

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