"Chris Cason" <del### [at] deletethistoopovrayorg> wrote in 
message news:47f0d198$1@news.povray.org...
> John D. Gwinner wrote:

> I don't think the language is the issue here - it's the support and UI
> libraries.

Right - MFC gives you the GUI but also some utility classes (collections, 
etc).  The reference to C# though meant also .Net - that would make the GUI 
and 3D parts easier I'd think.  It would also be one executable.  Then 
again, Java would do the same thing.

> Provided the MFC stuff is removed in favour of something else, plus any
> windows-specific non-MFC-isms fixed, the port should be fine in C++.

Right .....

> Of
> course the above is a lot of work.

Right - what I had been thinking is that a lot of the MFC stuff could be 
done pretty easily in .Net and in a pretty similar manner, reducing the 
work - however, on second thought, I bet it's probably just as much work and 
added to it the language conversion.

> With Moray going GPL3 we have a number
> of cross-plaform UI options open to us, including QT (for example).

I don't like QT due to religious reasons - their license agreement said if 
it's on Linux both multithreaded and regular libraries were free, but only 
allowed use of very limited Windows libraries (single threaded) if you were 
open source on a Windows platform.  I even emailed them and asked for an 
exception, and they were pretty blunt.  What I was trying to do was use 
BoundsChecker to find a pretty bad handle leak in their code, and the Open 
Source app (a database app) was multi-threaded.  It leaked GUI handles like 
no tomorrow.

Maybe it's changed though.

Of course, the same problems exist with POV-Ray, so it would be nice to have 
a common set of GUI libs / API's.

            == John ==

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