[Gambas-user] Windows version..

[Rob]

On Friday 18 July 2003 19:45, shannara at ...202... wrote:
> I am hoping that there is a Windows version of Gambas somewhere in the mix
> of all this? If so, that would rule.. I've been meaning to port over a few
> apps & game to linux & mac OSX, w/o using the lame .NET/Mono combo.

I don't think anyone has volunteered to make a Windows component yet.  If 
Trolltech provided a GPL version of Qt it would basically be already written, 
but they haven't and it's not.

Someone on the PerlQt mailing list was able to port PerlQt to the commercial 
version of Qt for Windows, but since QtWin isn't GPL'ed he couldn't 
distribute his Windows version in binary form. There is a port of the GPL'ed 
version of Qt to Cygwin, and I suspect porting Gambas to it might not be that 
hard since cygwin implements a lot of the things that make Unix Unix and 
Linux Linux, but making your users download 200MB of stuff to run your 10K 
app is not nice ;)

Better still would be if someone wrote a native Win32 replacement for the Qt 
component, since the GPL has an exception for linking against proprietary 
OS-provided libraries, but that would be an awful lot of work and would 
render projects not easily compilable on both without a preprocessor (since 
you'd be referencing gb.win32 all over the place rather than gb.qt.)

On top of that, I gather from some of the issues with Nvidia owners and shared 
object loading that Gambas might be tied in some respects to Unix style 
linking, which would provide an additional challenge for would-be windows 
porters.

I personally haven't done any Windows C++ work in 5 years or so, and wouldn't 
directly benefit from a Windows port of Gambas, but it sure would be cool to 
offer people a language that's not only aseasy as yet better than VB, but 
platform independent.

Rob