I think SDL is not a so good idea

[Paul Dufresne]

Tril said:
>I suggest SDL (simple directmedia layer) [1]; it's portable, runs on
>"Linux, Windows, BeOS, MacOS, MacOS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS,
>Solaris, IRIX, and QNX" [2] and supports at least X11, svgalib, GGI,
>and aalib graphics output.
>
>1. http://www.libsdl.org/
>2. http://www.libsdl.org/faq.php?action=listentries&category=1#54

Well, at first, I did really like your suggestion. In fact, I now remember
that it was suggested in previour IRC logs.

But seeing problems that Pupeno seems to have with sharing structures
between C and Slate, and novo suggesting that he should wait for
FFI (Foreign function interface I guess), then I am not sure SDL is right
for the moment.

The philosophy of Slate seeming to be, "we'll rewrite everything in Slate, 
even
the OS", I guess, we should keep a very low-level stuff, like svgalib, or 
even
extract the Vesa driver of svgalib (svgalib have it's own drivers for the 
main
graphic cards).

SDL is running over DirectX or GGI or X then, maybe it is too high-level.
I am afraid people will get use to current SDL way of doing, but all (I)
want, is to give very low-level access to graphics, to let Slate build a
gui over.

svgalib seems reasonable to be rewritten in Slate (850k sources),
and it is reasonable to begin with just the Vesa driver.

It's still unclear how we draw stuff with SDL (it's seems to be some kind of
plugin to do so). Also SDL seems to use a strict by events stuff, and I 
expect
Slate to build it's own event mechanism.

So my idea, is to keep with very near the machine stuff.

But this give me the portability problem.

Somehow, I really don't see why svgalib would be very hard to port
to Windows or an other OS. Or at least, part of it.

--Paul

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