[Mono-list] Implementing System.Windows.Forms

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

> That hasn't stopped others from starting work on SWF implementations, at
> least one of which is based on WineLib (currently in CVS).  It's quite
> likely that SWF work will continue into the future, and we will
> eventually have a 100% compatible implementation of SWF.  But a
> Xlib-based implementation of SWF is not a good idea, not if you desire
> 100% compatibility.  And if you don't care for 100% compatibility, why
> use Xlib instead of GTK+ or Qt?  Surely you'd prefer that SWF apps look
> like the rest of your programs...

After much debate over the last few weeks, I believe that using WineLib
is the only real option to have a serious implementation of
Windows.Forms.  

Implementing it from scratch on top of Xlib amounts to re-implementing
Wine for the reasons that Jonathan exposed: message processing has to be
compatible, message arguments have to be compatible, and the order in
which operations happen (and messages are delivered) has to be
compatible not to mention, that you also have to emulate some of the
drawing operations which are not supported directly by Xlib and will
require emulation support (which is already in Wine). 

The good news -as I said before- is that those with Win32 access can
start work on this using the real Win32 and we will later get the code
working on Linux by magic.

Miguel