"David H. Burns" <dhb### [at] cherokeetelnet> wrote:
> But I have learned some things lately. If one wants to do any
> programming for
> Windows, one must learn the Windows API. To many things, such as
> memory management, are involved.

That's not true. Maybe you need a basic understanding about how things work in
the Windows API, but most C++ frameworks will happily prevent you from ever
having to get into details, unless you really want to.

If you want to do *without* a framework, then yes, you'll have a steep learning
curve ahead of you.


> I had a vastly overly simplistic view
>   of the situation. I wonder how Linux does things, but I'm afraid
> learning it
> at this point is not a live option.

With Linux the thing gets even more troublesome: There's no such thing as "the"
Linux GUI API. It depends on the desktop environment you're using, e.g. KDE,
Gnome, or what-have-you. The good news is that they all share a common
denominator, the X Windowing System; the bad news is that I heard tell that
it's a monster, too. (But I may be utterly wrong about this; the only time I
ever had to do graphical output on Unix from C/C++ code, I resorted to sending
PostScript output to the screen via GhostScript - But back then I had just
begun to learn C/C++, the Intarwebs was still a toddler, and I didn't have the
slightest clue how to google it all up... or rather, altavista it up :P)

However, I bet that just like with Windows, there's a host of frameworks out
there to simplify your life in Linux as well. And maybe a few that even have an
implementation for both, so that you wouldn't have to change a single thing to
port your app to the other OS.

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