🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan24.233048.5960@ais.com> bruce@ais.com (Bruce C. Wright) writes:

>>If anyone has worked in both MS Windows and X windows environment, I
>>would like to know about your experience about these two with respect to
>>:-
>>1. ease of learning.
>>2. flexibility in design and implementation
>>3. ease in implementing a given application (probably 2 should cover
>>this)
>>4. portability.
>>
>>I would appreciate any comments on these issues. Please send your
>>responses to dhan@cs.arizona.edu

Bruce Wright doesn't mention the plethora of multiplatform development
toolkits available, which mean that you don't have to choose which
to develop on - you can develop on both simultaneously. Who would want to
develop on just one platform these days...? It doesn't seem worth spending
your precious time putting all your eggs in one basket, given the cost
of developing GUI apps.

>    1)	...
>
>	For the programmer the biggest problems with Xwindows are that it
>	doesn't support printing very well

Indeed; but multiplatform development toolkits presumably provide PostScript
generation under X (?) -- at least my freeby C++ toolkit wxWindows has a go at it.

>    3)	Ease of implementing a given application -- Depends on what the
>	application is.  In general X is nicer because it is harder to
>	crash the whole system than it is with MS-windows (X is usually
>	implemented on a true protected-mode OS, while MS-Windows is
>	only a sort of pretend protected-mode system; it's very easy to
>	crash it during development)

I don't crash Windows very often these days (once in a blue moon), but admittedly
it's easier to develop on a big, fast X machine than a slow PC.
>
>    4)	Portability -- If this is important then there's really no
>	choice;  MS-Windows apps are the epitome of non-portable code:
>	X is your only alternative.

?uh? There's lots of choice in that using a commercial toolkit, you
could run your apps on Macs, Windows, NT, X (Motif/OpenLook), OS/2... even
DOS (ugh).

I'm writing a reasonably big application on Windows and X but it's not fully commercial
so maybe my relatively happy experience is not typical. For what it's worth
my C++ toolkit, wxWindows, is available by ftp from skye.aiai.ed.ac.uk, directory pub/wxwin.

Julian Smart
jacs@aiai.ed.ac.uk