2 Mar
2011
2 Mar
'11
2:27 p.m.
On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 8:20 AM, Olivier Guilyardi <list(a)samalyse.com> wrote:
On 03/02/2011 12:22 AM, David Robillard wrote:
No, not really.
Apart from mobile web apps, a way to build cross-platform apps is using a
lightweight toolkit, with OpenGL for all graphics, and a couple of other entry
points such as an audio I/O callback, etc..
With this method, notably used by game devs, there's one code base, with thin
platform drivers.
i should comment here: although this is the *theory* behind game
development, its very far from the reality. for a variety of reasons,
i've been exposed to some of the internals of a number of real world
games recently, and they are the biggest mish-mash of toolkits and
APIs that i've come across. although its not the rule, its not
uncommon to find windows games, for example, that use up to three
different APIs for delivering audio.
its certainly a good theoretical target, but don't hold up game
development as an example of somewhere that actually follows this
practice uniformly.
On Tue, 2011-03-01 at 19:36 +0100, Olivier
Guilyardi wrote:
Hmm, what
platform specific native code? In my idea, the host would handle
setting up the GL viewport and such.
... "the host would <platform specific native code>" ;) But this later problem could be solved with a simple
audio-oriented UI toolkit,
which would render using OpenGL. A such toolkit could actually be very
lightweight. For instance you do not necessarily need to embed entire charsets.
A couple of characters (digits, "dB", etc..) could be sufficient in many cases.
i know its the reality that you're facing right now, but as a bit of
an old-timer, i have to say that a lot of this discussion reminds me
of the early days of windows on 16 bit processors when people went to
all kinds of crazy effort to pack stuff into a hardware-limited
situation. it doesn't help things right now, but i just want to remind
you (as an old-timer) that just about every one of the limits you're
trying hard to pay attention to will evaporate within the next 5 years
:)
--p