[fpc-pascal] fpGUI powered by OpenGL

dhkblaszyk at zeelandnet.nl dhkblaszyk at zeelandnet.nl
Mon Dec 20 15:50:52 CET 2010


> But why is it not possible to integrate this with the regular fpGUI ?
> Can you explain in a couple of sentences ?

 Can't remember having said that it was impossible with the current 
 approach. In fact it is perfectly doable. However (free)glut and opengl 
 are already available on a large number of platforms/targets. So if 
 fpGUI is built upon these libs then you immediately take the benefit of 
 being able to support these platforms. Additionally you don't have to 
 implement a "complex" interface between the different platforms this is 
 handled already by glut and opengl for you. So in effect it could make 
 fpGUI simpler. And the last plus is having a hardware accelerated gui. 
 It just means it's lightning fast and that's a plus for UI's.
 Thats not all however, there are minusses. By using glut, you limit 
 yourself to the supported platforms/targets. So if new platforms/targets 
 come along then there is no way (unless you supply patches to the 
 project) to add them. With the current approach you're free to do it 
 yourself. Also the API is plain rigid. This means you'll have to adapt 
 to that and live with it (notice it's a plus and minus depending on how 
 you look at it). (That is why I would like to see a fpGlut some day ;) 
 and believe me it will come to that eventually!)

 I probably forgot a few plusses and minusses, but that's about it as 
 far as I'm concerned. Also I don't mean to say that using an opengl/glut 
 backend is superior to the current ones. It just has other benefits I 
 suppose.

 Regards, Darius



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