caseih wrote: ↑Oct 01, 2022 19:19
Although FreeBASIC is somewhat compatible with C++ (GCC anyway) in terms of name mangling and vtables, in generally it's very difficult to interface with a C++ library from FreeBASIC.
True. So don't. Convert the whole library. The current Free Pascal one is also based on an early version of Tvision.
In the late nineties Borland was open sourcing the old stuff, but they stopped before they released the last Pascal based one. We already had preempted that release so when Borland changed course we got into copyright problems and had to rip out the Pascal TV.
We re-engineered on a 3rd part C++ to port Pascal. Unfortunately that port was for a Graphics mode, so we had to do costly reengineering of the coordinate system to blocks back. The whole operation cost us two years
Maybe if the TVision library does not use any templates, eschews multiple inheritance, and does not use any features of the C++ object model that FB does not know about, it could be possible to translate the header files to FB.
Afaik the original is quite clean since developed in lock-step with Borland Pascal. The templating was not that strong in the nineties yet anyway. The 2.0 was never fully ported to Borland Pascal though, that stuck on iirc 1.5 with some additions.
As neat as TVision is (and it indeed blew me away in the 90s), maybe a modern native-FB TUI library along similar lines to
Textual is a better way to go. Exploits modern terminals like the new Windows terminal, 24-bit color, unicode, etc, whiles preserving the advantages of being able to work remotely on a remote server.
I don't recognize Texual as a TUI. On me it looks like an textual webbrowser with some smooth fade in of the left bar. I get the impression that somebody backported bunch of GUI metaphores haphazardly to something character oriented and now is trying to promote it as next gen UI.
OTOH, maybe I'm a dinosaur because I always liked the central position of keyboard of the TUIs (and early Windows GUI for that matter, I could install and configure/operate win2000 keyboard only). I also despise the relatively low density and the following excessive need for scrolling and low overview. (and I consider that a problem with many modern GUI concepts too)
I spent quite some time in a TUI (but not TV) mail application for FIDO networks called Golded. For me that app was still the pinnacle of TUI. Intermediate users could operate it _SO_ fast.
