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macOS Motif/Xt programming is a major pain in the.. well..
- Thread starter yeroen
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That was me venting at work. Believe me, I wish it was Qt. I could have saved 2 months of pain.
I'm adding an extension to an application suite where all the GUI's are in Motif (yes, it's about 10 years old, if not more). Actually, straight Xt/Motif wouldn't be so bad, but most of the GUI code is wrapped within a certain proprietary 3rd party GUI builder and scripting layer (which looks like Ada, or a kind of proto-Ruby). That is what is getting in the way, making it enormously unpleasant.
Eventually, the plan is to migrate from that framework and port all the GUI's over to Qt. But it's going to be a big effort because so much of the functionality of the app is written in that proprietary dialog scripting language.
It's good practice though for one of my side-projects, which hasn't quite gotten off the ground yet, of porting DDD from Motif over to Qt4. If you look at the DDD source, there is no clean separation between the GUI and application layer, so rather than a port it's likely to be a complete rewrite.
I'm hopeful I can find the willpower to see it through, since DDD is sorely in need of a modern look and feel.
I'm adding an extension to an application suite where all the GUI's are in Motif (yes, it's about 10 years old, if not more). Actually, straight Xt/Motif wouldn't be so bad, but most of the GUI code is wrapped within a certain proprietary 3rd party GUI builder and scripting layer (which looks like Ada, or a kind of proto-Ruby). That is what is getting in the way, making it enormously unpleasant.
Eventually, the plan is to migrate from that framework and port all the GUI's over to Qt. But it's going to be a big effort because so much of the functionality of the app is written in that proprietary dialog scripting language.
It's good practice though for one of my side-projects, which hasn't quite gotten off the ground yet, of porting DDD from Motif over to Qt4. If you look at the DDD source, there is no clean separation between the GUI and application layer, so rather than a port it's likely to be a complete rewrite.
I'm hopeful I can find the willpower to see it through, since DDD is sorely in need of a modern look and feel.
Hmm, that'll be good. Having DDD using a modern GUI would actually make more Mac developers feel like using it I would imagine. Not a tool I have any experience of myself probably should look into it.
