[xiphos-devel] an idea for the future of xiphos

[Christopher Bayliss]

The recent release made me think about this. :)

I imagine the GTK3 support must be pretty bad now as there have been a
lot of API changes, but I haven't used xiphos in awhile, life has been
**very busy**. So I was thinking about a way to make it easier to use
newer GUI toolkits:

We could separate out all the cool features of xiphos that are not GUI
related and put them into a library called libxiphos.

Then write a new frontend in, for example, python and GTK3. Or not. If
we have libxiphos, it would be easier to use an entirely different
toolkit, like Qt5.

I guess my point is it will get harder to maintain the GTK3 part of
Xiphos as they change the way it works more with each release, meaning
we are going to have to rewrite the way we use the GTK3 API anyway.
However it looks like the GTK team is working on a plan to make this
easier:

https://blog.gtk.org/2016/09/01/versioning-and-long-term-stability-promise-in-gtk/

IDK if my idea is a good solution, but I believe we are going to have to
figure something out, so I proposing it anyway. :) One of the advantages
of using a scripting language like python to write the frontend in is,
it would be fast to write. (I hate python, but I see it's uses) And if
we have libxiphos, which would be largely c and c++, we wouldn't have
any of the performance issues that python commonly brings with it.

Lastly I'd be down for a team effort to do a whole bunch of work on
xiphos in about a month, if we can find a similar times that we can work
together on it.

-- cjbayliss