Date: 10/2/2010
| Well it's been some years now since a decent build of Scribe or i.Ftp has been done for Linux or Mac, and I'm beginning to rethink my strategy with regards to Lgi and it's cross platform nature. One option that is increasingly attractive to me is making a "port" of Lgi to something like GTK. It's kinda cheating and it won't be pretty or super fast. But it would give my a leg up to making the apps run without huge issues on the platforms that I want to target. I think it especially makes sense for Linux because it's a standard library thats already installed and the current XCB codebase is likely going down the wrong track performance wise. I think XCB on the surface is a great idea, but in practice there is too little documentation, examples and community to help you through. I suspect the larger widget libraries are using a single X window at the top level and then managing all their own widgets as "virtual" sub-windows that X doesn't know about directly. Thats good for performance and good for visual flexibility, but a lot of work. If I was to retrofit my XCB codebase for that it would only mean I'll never finish anything.
So it's 2010, and I have a limited amount of coding time.. so what works for me is getting the most bang for buck. That means leveraging what I can to get the software running and stable even if it means making sacrifices in some areas with regards to speed and dependencies. The 2 target API's I have in mind are GTK and Qt, both of which are LGPL like Lgi, so I think license wise I'm ok. When I started Lgi, GTK and Qt weren't widely known or used, and I wouldn't have written Lgi if there was an obvious alternative. But now there are lots of obvious alternatives and I'm think I should maybe transition away from maintaining this large codebase I've built up over the years.
I do have reservations with GTK, the unholy amount of whitespace it seems to use everywhere for one, but I have a lot of custom controls that I could use instead of the GTK controls. So maybe all I have to do is write a really thin layer that uses a bare minimum of GTK for a drawable custom control that gets reused by all the native Lgi controls. And I can still override the file open dialogs with the native ones etc.
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