On 7/17/07, David Bergman <David.Bergman@bergmangupta.com> wrote:
That would be interesting, but, honestly, what - if any - pieces would be relevant to Boost?
In general, there are a few areas that might be concrete and reapplicable enough to warrant Boost inclusion (or at least discussion):
1. Graphical user interface library. Such as win32gui for all (well, at least Linux, OS X and Win32..) platforms. There are a lot of potential input/inspiration in the game developer communities here. The GUI of a game is general enough (buttons, overlays, text, scrollbar...) that it might be isolated.
Since you went there... I'd just like to make a request, that if you all go ahead with making a generic boost GUI library, could you please try to make some sort of a generic UI layer underneath that? My reasoning here is that if someone is making a generic library, or portable application, in a lot of cases they don't necessarily need to tie their communication with the user to a particular modality (like visual/graphics). I.e., if I'm a portable app, I want to say "inform the user that foo is bar", and then it is up to the available UI modules to decide, depending on the context, whether a fancy flashing display saying "foo is bar!" will appear, whether it will be announced over the speakers, or whether the device will place a phone call to my mother and tell her that it is of utmost importance that she informs me that foo is bar because i can't seem to be reached any other way. Of course, this is a huge thing to do in itself, and admittedly, the game engine scenario is one of the places where you really need GUI and don't necessarily care for a generic UI layer. But, you mentioned Boost GUI... and I had to throw this out :-) Stjepan