Started X11 UI backend
Monday, March 20, 2006
The Cocoa backend is almost complete; it is missing a few features which
depend on the ability to call methods on a superclass inside an
Objective C method definition. Once I implement this feature, I can
continue working on the Cocoa backend, but today, I decided to start the
X11 backend instead. So far, I’ve moved the core of Eduardo’s X11
bindings from contrib/x11/
to library/x11/
, and cleaned up some of
his utility words. I got it to the stage where a GLX window rendering
Factor UI gadgets is displayed, however input does not work yet.
Here is my rough list of goals for Factor 0.81:
- Finish Cocoa and X11 UI backends
- Make the UI faster, write some new graphical tools
- Wait for Doug Coleman to finish the Windows UI backend :-)
Basically 0.81 is all about callbacks in the FFI, and the new super-duper platform-tuned UI.
Developing Factor has been a great educational experience for me. I taught myself many new things:
- The C language
- x86, PowerPC and AMD64 assembly
- OpenGL
- Cocoa (although my first exposure to Cocoa was a commercial gig, I still learned a lot more about Cocoa internals while writing the Factor Cocoa binding)
- X11 - learning it right now
- Language design and implementation techniques
- I even learned JVM bytecode so I could write the early JFactor compiler…