[fpc-other] Re: inf files and textmode IDE (fwd)

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 6 September 2010 17:58, Tomas Hajny wrote:
>
> Neither Lazarus IDE nor MSEide are available under OS/2 and I don't expect
> that to change any time soon. So if I use an IDE (rather than a standalone
> editor and command line tools - that is an option I occasionally use too
> depending on the particular task), it's the textmode IDE.

Ah, a valid point. I forgot about the OS/2 developers. This brings me
to another question I have been meaning to ask you (seeing that you
are the only FPC developer under OS/2 I know). Sybil (or WDSybil)
still runs under OS/2, does it not?  It is open-source, so is it not
possible to allow Sybil to call FPC instead of the Sybil compiler?
This should give you an instant "object pascal friendly" IDE to work
with - hopefully with relatively little effort.

Alternatively, and something that has been on my mind for a while. I
was a big fan of OS/2 in the early 90's. I even did promotional work
for IBM (not that it helped much). Does OS/2 support SDL? I'm seeing a
gap in the market, and would like to kill two birds with one stone.
I'm getting a renewed interest in OS/2, and I'm lately rather
impressed with Haiku as well. I think Haiku supports SDL already. What
I'm getting at, is writing a new fpGUI backend with SDL, so I can
target all those "specialized" platforms with a single fpGUI backend -
similar to what Pixel32 (photo editing software) project did.

In my spare time (when I wasn't arguing with Marco or the Lazarus
developers <wink>), I starting writing a fpGUI based IDE. This was
done two-fold: 1) to get the features I wanted in a IDE,  2) to create
a more realistic "real world" application that can show off fpGUI a
bit. Many developers still think fpGUI is pretty useless, but they are
wrong. Hopefully DocView was a push in the right direction. As a side
note, I would also like the efforts I put into the IDE, to help some
platforms get more use out of FPC. Platforms like OS/2 and Haiku, by
giving them a new GUI development framework and some tools to use it
with. After all, they already have the excellent FPC compiler.


> I'm not sure whether redesigning it is really necessary (especially if the
> goals, advantages and collateral damages are not known beforehand ;-) ),
> but I'd appreciate fixing whatever bugs are there.

Exactly my point. I would rather fix the few bugs in the textmode IDE,
and then spend the bulk of my spare time developing a more up-to-date
IDE and GUI framework for those niche/specialized OS's. OS's which
Lazarus and MSEide are not currently targeting. The benefits will be
much greater I think.


-- 
Regards,
  - Graeme -


_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/