No sign of V

Mmmm .. three alligators .. no sign of V

No, not Thomas Pynchon’s novel, but the V programming language . I am always on the lookout for software that might conceivably be ported to RISC OS. Well according to the hype, all you have to do is compile the single C source file

cc -o v v.c

Built-in OpenGL/DirectX and a GUI library that tries to be “as similar to native GUI as possible” suggests that “all you have to do is compile a single file” is doing a lot of lifting.

There’s no mention of anything GUI-related in the library documents on the V website, and I’m not sure what “native GUI” means in a Linux context, which is one of the supported platforms…

There’s no mention of anything GUI-related in the library documents on the V website, and I’m not sure what “native GUI” means in a Linux context, which is one of the supported platforms…

You have not scrolled down very far on the main V website, have you?

I’m not sure what “native GUI” means in a Linux context

Even the screenshot on https://github.com/vlang/ui looks like a Mac knockoff, rather than an actual Mac app.

I was looking on the site which has the descriptions of the API routines. It isn’t mentioned there. It turns out that

1. It’s pre-alpha software, with many bits missing
2. Native is only for Mac and Windows — not Linux
3. There are no native versions at present anyway.
4. On Linux it will be a “lightweight alternative to Qt and GTK".

I’m struggling to see what it offers that Dart/Flutter doesn’t.

If we’re thinking about porting things to RISC OS, I’d highly recommend Tcl/Tk. It’s a powerful scripting language, and a fantastic and very beautiful GUI tool kit.

I swear by it, I use it for lots of my quick scripting purposes these days. It never lets me down.

I’d highly recommend Tcl/Tk.

I could swear that it has already been ported, and that it was done back in the 80s, in the 26-bit days. But I cannot remember who did it. It might be worth a search in the archives.

Yep, I ran into mention of it a couple of years ago when I was trying to port the SQLite test suite (which uses Tcl itself). As far as I could tell it was never 32-bitted, so I gave up on that idea and implemented the tests a completely different way.

That reminds me that my actual SQLite port needs to be updated to the latest version one of these days…