> > Following ideas do not have a ticket yet.
> > - GUI improvements (get rid of floats)
>
> It would be good to know Petr's opinion about this.
For the sake of completeness, here are two citations from my thesis regarding
the possibility of porting some existing drawing library or widget toolkit to
HelenOS.
" Considering which existing library would be suitable for HelenOS, Cairo
seems to be a particularly sound candidate as it is written in C language, it
is open-source and it is sufficiently portable according to the preliminary
investigation. From the HelenOS viewpoint, it should be enough to improve the
math support in C library and perhaps create a fork of Cairo to adjust its
build system and remove its non-optional dependency on GLib (which is seemingly
unnecessary if bindings to other languages are not important). Overall, such
minimalistic port of Cairo would provide only a single software rendering
backend based on Pixman* and a basic embedded font engine**. As an alternative
to Cairo, there is an interesting drawing library from Google, called Skia.
Although Skia is also highly portable and provides similar features as Cairo,
it is written in C++ which is currently not supported by HelenOS. "
* Pixman is bottom part component of Cairo providing software pixel renderering
for upper vector-based layers of Cairo.
** If not linked with advanced font library, Cairo provides embedded fallback
font engine with limited features.
" When looking around for a widget toolkit that could be ported to HelenOS,
there are not as many possibilities as one would expect. Established
cross-platform widget toolkits like Qt, GTK+ or wxWidgets are too complex (to
various extent they can be all considered as operating system abstraction
layers***), too large and have too many dependencies to be considered
reasonable candidates for HelenOS at this point. Then, there are more
light-weight toolkits like IUP that seem promising at first look, but closer
examination reveals they are built on top of the native widget toolkits.
Basically the only toolkit that is sufficiently light-weight and requires just
some drawing library underneath is FLTK. Its only downside is that it is
implemented in C++ language which is currently not supported by HelenOS.
However, FLTK avoids using advanced runtime features of C++ like exceptions or
RTTI in order to increase its portability, which is indeed convenient in case
it would be ported to HelenOS in the future. "
*** I.e. not only graphics, but also databases, multimedia, networking, web,
scripting etc.
Regarding Qt, GTK+ or wxWidgets, I am not saying it is not possible to port
them, but I think HelenOS is currently not able to accomodate them as a whole
and it would be challenging to extract just a graphics related part from them.
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