I think SDL is not a so good idea

[David Hopwood]

Paul Dufresne wrote:
> 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.

I agree that SDL is too high-level, but conversely trying to rewrite device
drivers is too low-level -- and just too much work. A reasonable compromise
might be to write in terms of an interface like GGI
<http://www.ggi-project.org/documentation/index.html>
<http://www.ggi-project.org/documentation/topic-introduction.html>.
Note that GGI also has back-ends for X11, svgalib, fbdev, DirectX, etc.,
but it is more minimalist than SDL, so if you want "very low-level access
to graphics, to let Slate build a gui over", I think GGI is probably a
better match.

(It's also quite portable; see <http://www.ggi-project.org/platforms.html>.)

> 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.

All graphics libraries want to do events their own way, including GGI.
However GGI's event mechanism seems quite lightweight.

-- 
David Hopwood <david.nospam.hopwood at blueyonder.co.uk>