On Wed, 17 Oct 2001, Mark Hahn wrote:
> I investigated using SDL for a while to build my own Swing on, but it's lack
> of window control made it impossible.  I started adding klidges to SDL but I
> was discovering missing pieces faster than I was fixing them.  It's a shame
> because the Ruby and SDL combo is screamingly fast.
> Do you know of any other unbloated graphics device layer like SDL that is
> platform independent?

There is X11, which is portable enough that X11 displays for Win32, MacOS
and NeXT/MacOSX (and even DOS) are common.

There are three Ruby X11 interfaces. AFAIK, only the one called "RubyX11"
(mine) has a goal of providing a complete interface to every feature of
X11, and make that comfortable enough for the toolkit developer.

About the bloatedness of X11... you may call it completeness instead. It
supports windows, double buffering, server-plugins, inter-client
communication, etc. If the thing looks large and convoluted, don't worry.
The more I look at the beast, the smaller it looks. As a result, RubyX11
(like Perl's X11::Protocol) is 100k and does not depend on any C code at
all (except TCPSocket/UNIXSocket). Now it isn't that fast, but I guess
it'll only encourage a toolkit developer to come up with efficient
algorithms. (Ruby itself encourages that too.)

So if you want to write a toolkit, I have already begun something. tell
me if you're interested.

________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard                   http://hostname.2y.net/~matju