On Sep 24, 2010, at 11:55 AM, Chris Albertson wrote: > The way to solve this best is to use this: http://www.swig.org/ > Using Swig it is easy to support many languages without a lot of effort
Swig does certain things but not others, especially it has no support for Qt's meta object system IIRC. Anyway, the point is that there should be a clean, documented way of scripting XCircuit, using some dynamic language. As long as documentation is provided, with examples, and it's easy to use, users will follow. > The best thing that could be done for xcircuit, to make it more popular is > 1) Connect it with other software. Make it easy to exchange data > 2) Make a very good and robust library, or better give it a way to use several > other libraries It should also link to online component distributors, etc. If you wish to code up screenscraping DigiKey's web interface in C, be my guest. I know how to do it using what's provided by Qt and WebKit, and suddenly you only have to deal with the functionality, not with menial fluff. The way to doing all that you talk about is first to have a foundation that makes it easy to write modern software on. Plain C, even with Tcl/Tk, doesn't provide it. Plain C++, with C++ standard library (a.k.a. STL), with Tk accessed via cpptk++, doesn't provide it either. GTK could provide it were there a company with formerly Trolltech's and now Nokia's resources pumping money into it, but as of now GTK lags so far behind Qt it's hopeless. Languages using CLR or JVM could provide it, but I like Qt's approach to GUI better than WinForms or Swing. That's a personal preference. So, with C++ I can forgo having to go through a resource-heavy shim -- Jambi -- between Qt and JVM. Obviously Qt can be used directly from managed C++, but that's a pain and shims are up to you. Then there is SMOKE and Qyoto that auto-shim Qt to use with CLR, but that's akin to Jambi, and has even fewer developers working on it/using it IIRC. Cheers, Kuba _______________________________________________ Xcircuit-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.opencircuitdesign.com/mailman/listinfo/xcircuit-dev
