Steinar Bang wrote:
One of my "perhaps-hobby-to-be-should-I-get-any-free-time" ideas I've been playing with in my mind, have been to find the latest, and newest version of Fresco's predecessor InterViews (I'd start with ivtools) and then apply the "grandfather's knife principle"(*) to it.
Ie. change it piece by piece to use standard C++ constructs where applicable, and boost constructs where they are applicable. But do the change gradually so that I've always have some compilable, working code.
It's a neat design. The latest incarnations of InterViews are Fresco without the CORBA (...well, and parts are non-glyph-based stuff that is interesting as well, such as Unidraw).
I find ivtools quite messy in many respects. It looks like a repository of multiple branches, all partially merged together. And Unidraw (in that incarnation at least) uses an ad-hoc type system which makes it hard to evolve into something clean. At least that was my impression when I tried to rewrite Unidraw in the context of the second generation of Fresco. It was really a rewrite based on Vlissides' thesis, as opposed to ivtools. I'm thus not sure whether it is really a good idea to provide incremental enhancement to that code. Anyways, the code is all still available, so if anybody wants to get his hands dirty, let me know ! :-) But seriously, I'm glad that I'm not the only one who feels a bit nostalgic at the sound of those names. There is a great many things to be learned from those experiments and it would be fun to resume, from a healthy distance, and with modern tools. Regards, Stefan