PureBasic Forums - English

The key selling point for me to add PureBasic to my programming toolkit was the ability to develop Linux, Amiga and (soon I hope) Mac OS software.

Now if you scroll through the list of available commands, especially GADGET objects, you will find a lot of them that are available for the three current platforms, but some that are not. This reflects whether the object is supported by the OS.

I would like to see some way for the user community to help provide the missing functions. The complexity of this can be quite great, because the code can only use provided functions, and never directly access any API code. But it should be possible to add functions like the spin gadget to the other OS's by using buttons and code.

The question, is if the user community can provide the functions, can Fred integrate them into the existing libraries? Given that the libraries are written in assembly language, this may require some creative thinking.

This have been asked many times before. PB is advertised as being cross-plaform when it is not completely. The version numbers do not reflect the language itself and so on and so forth. This have been asked many times (since I joined the community) to no avail.

Gotta remember, this is more-or-less a 1 man company who is already stretched to his limits (as shown by the differences between the different platform versions of PB). Then we have the upcoming MacOSX version, erk!

I wish you luck, however I do not see this happening anytime in the near future. Yes, I sound like such a pessimist But, I've been here long enough to..... check out the history files on all the versions, and draw your own conclusions

I personally only code for windows so I don't have these gripes but I follow other peoples threads on this issue, I didn't realise the different platforms differed so much. I have now become quite interested as to how this will be addresses by Fred, and would like to read a post from Fred or someone else more 'au fait' with PB internals (Timo perhaps?). Will all versions of PB be syncronised to duplicate exact funtionality on all platforms? I hope so. Is it harder to implement than it seems?

My real question was not so much can anyone provide code to emulate a function from the other platform, but if someone did, is it possible to have the compiler link to that function for that platform.

For example, the treegadget is supported by windows and linux. If some enterprising individual writes a treegadget function for Amiga, is there some way to inform the compiler that an equivilent function exists for it to call?

There are only two ways for us users to maintain compatibility between platforms, one is to avoid functions not universally used, and the other is to implement missing functions.

My understanding is that one of the features planned for the next version would be Macros. A macro would be an excellent way to implement a missing function, and an excellent way for Fred to offload some of the detail work.