Know of Substantial Apps Written in Python?

[Bernhard Herzog]

grante at visi.com (Grant Edwards) writes:

> On Fri, 30 Mar 2001 21:44:29 -0600, Grant Griffin <not.this at seebelow.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi Grant,
> 
> >Hey, I looked at that, and it looks cool.  But I was somewhat
> >puzzled by the following statement:
> >
> >   Sketch is an interactive vector drawing program for Linux
> >   and other UNIX compatible systems. <snip>
> >   
> >   A somewhat unique(for a drawing program) feature of Sketch
> >   is that it is implemented almost completely in a very
> >   high-level, interpreted language, Python.
> >
> >If it's implemented almost completely in Python, why does it
> >only run on "UNIX-compatible" systems?  (BTW, does it delete
> >hyphens? <wink>) Is there something about its "almost" part
> >that can't be done in Windows.
> 
> I believe it uses standard Tcl/Tk, PIL, and one module with
> support functions written in C.  I would guess that the C stuff
> has never been ported to non-Unix platforms.  It looks like
> some of the low-level drawing and rendering stuff is written in
> C (I presume for performance reasons), as well as some
> file-parsing and font manipulation routines.

That's quite accurate.

The main reason Sketch only runs on Unix-Like systems is that it
accesses Xlib directly to do the rendering, but there are some other
things as well. The C-modules will have to be changed a bit to compile
with microsoft compilers, for instance.

The development versions use GTK for the GUI and its GDK part or libart
(a library for anti-aliased rendering) for the rendering and they may be
easier to port to Windows and other Platforms supported by GTK.

I occasionally get mails asking for a Windows version of Sketch, but so
far nobody wanted to do the work :)

  Bernhard

-- 
Intevation GmbH                                 http://intevation.de/
Sketch                                 http://sketch.sourceforge.net/
MapIt!                                               http://mapit.de/