Re: [eclipse-dev] SWT C++ port

[Seth Nickell <snickell@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Cesar,

Because the SWT is released under the CPL, you could certainly *legally*
do a rewrite of SWT in C++ (releasing your version under the CPL too).

However, rewriting SWT in C++ would be a non-trivial undertaking and
probably not very productive. Many of SWT's peculiar design goals are
driven by its implementation in Java and would probably be best done
differently in a C++ implementation (for example, interfacing with
native code and C structures is much more straightforward in C++, and
this would probably change a lot of things).

If you need a single API in your C++ application that allows you to
target both Win32 and GTK+ with native LNF, I would recommend using
wxWindows (http://www.wxwindows.org). It supports both of those
platforms as well as MacOS and Motif.

-Seth

On Fri, 2002-12-27 at 08:47, Cesar Mello wrote:
> Hi friends,
> 
> I have posted this message on swt-platform-dev but I had no reply yet. First
> of all, congratulations for the excellent work being done on Eclipse.
> 
> I have a question about SWT porting: is it allowed to port SWT itself to
> C++? I mean write SWT in C++ instead of Java, are there legal issues?
> If it is allowed, I'm very interested in making a port.
> 
> > Just curious: why do you see  a need for this?
> 
> Because I wouldn't like to bind my product to Java. At least, I wouldn't
> like to bind it to a virtual machine. So I still consider using a Java
> native compiler, but so far I haven't seen the performance I need in these
> products.
> 
> > And you want to implement SWT in C++ on all platforms?
> 
> I need it for Windows and Linux (GTK2). I really don't see this as a work
> from scratch, because the SWT Java code already uses Win32 and GTK2 the same
> way I would need for C++. So in my opinion, much of the work is really
> Java -> C++ syntax porting
> 
> Thank you a lot for the attention.
> 
> Best regards,
> Cesar Mello
> ICQ 2009322
> 
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