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Date: 20 Aug 1995 20:26:00 +0200
From: Wolfgang Muees <wolfgang@wmsickte.escape.de>
To: J.Smart@ed.ac.uk
Message-Id: <5sCUax7DpZB@wmsickte.escape.de>
Subject: wxWindows, once more
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Status: REO

Julian,

thank you very much for reacting on my suggestions... :-) I find it very  
exiting that there are other people living on this planet who are also  
interested in making portable GUIs...

While you work ( :-) ), I decided to make myself more familiar with  
wxWindows. I simply take my wxWindows 1.62 and disabled the precompiled  
headers of BC++... so I can continue.

By the way: before I know something about wxWindows, I have done a  
research for myself: If you have different classes for each platform, how  
must the structure of the GUI be? ZINC AF (which I know) does platform  
switching via #defines and #ifdefs. Very bad. I found that having base  
classes for each class and concrete classes in different directories be  
the best way... So you can imagine that wxWindows (which does it exactly  
how I though) expresses me. (Using the "factory" design pattern is not  
applicable for wxWin because the user is required to subclass the wxWin  
classes.)

Here is a list of topics I find out while making wxWindows libraries and  
samples:

1) some DOS versions accept only ONE parameter after "erase". So in the  
makefiles, I have to expand "erase p1 p2 p3...." into multiple lines.

2) in src\makefile.bcc, "erase wxwin.cfg" is missing for "clean":

3) in src\msw\makefile.bcc, I removed a space... there is a line defining  
the compiler option for compile a source file. It looks like:
-c {.....}
I removed the space after the "-c". So the DOS command line does not  
exceed 128 chars, which will break MAKE.

4) in wx_setup.h, I set USE_ODBC=0. (You know it)

5) for BC++ Version 4 and later, you need to include an additional library  
for EACH example. It is named "NOEHWL" (16 bit windows) and has to be  
linked in prior to all other libraries. I inserted noehwl into the line  
defining the libs. The purpose of NOEHWL is to remove unnesseccary  
exception handling code inside the borland standard libraries. (And NEW  
does return NULL instead of throwing an exception).

6) I suggest that you support a link options file (much like WXWIN.CFG for  
the compiler). So you can reference this file from each sample, and  
maintaining the samples and additional exes would be much easier.

7) I changed some compiler options:

option  meaning
-k-     do not generate a stack frame (smaller and faster code)
-N-     remove stack check
-po     use fastthis calling convention (16bit windows)
        ( "this" is given to the method via register)
-RT-    disable runtime type information (!!!)
-vi     do inline optimisations
-x-     disable exceptions (!!!)
-xc     compatible exceptions on (!!!)

if you specify "-x-" and "-xc", the compiler completely stops emitting  
exception information.

I have NOT verified that these options are valid for BC++ versions prior  
4.5. (Support for out-of-date compiler versions seems not reasonable to  
me).

8) I changed some linker options:

option  meaning
/Oc     do chained fixups
/Oi     optimize iterated data
/P      compress code segments

NOTE: the linker of BC++ Version 4.5 is enhanced to do better  
optimisations (if you request them....)

9) in src\makefile.bcc, I defined FINAL=1 (near the line DEBUG=0).

What I get:
- library gets maked
- samples compiled
(there are still some warnings. I saw that you turned some warnings off.  
Not good...)

Some words about program length:

My first "HELLO.EXE" was more than 1200 KB.

My last "HELLO.EXE" is about 577 KB.

I don't thing that wxWindows has a "large exe" problem. Only a "not the  
right compiler options" problem....(Setting options if difficult in BC++  
because there are too much of them).

Regards
Wolfgang

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