The Whole is Less than the Sum of the Parts

OK, so after some more hacking, I have got the current svn head of clutter to build, and the MSVC 2k5 project files are now in the repository, including project files for all the current tests. I am pleased to say that almost no changes were needed to the clutter sources, and it works pretty well even on my ageing Intel 82852 graphics card (and, of all the tests, only 3 do not work, 2 of those are due to known limitations of the current SDL backend).

Some observations. First of all on OpenGL programming for windows: in the year 2007 you only get a 1997 version of OpenGL (v1.1); probably not surprising, considering M$ investment in DirectX. Anyway, it makes no difference thanks to the nice idea behind the GLee library by Ben Woodhouse, which transparently handles the extension API for you — basically, you do #include <gl/glee.h> instead of #include <gl/gl.h>, add the (static) glee.lib to the linker command line, and then can use OpenGL API up to 2.2 plus any vendor extensions the HW might support (and it works on *nix, win32 and Mac OSX!).

Second, all *nix programmers should time from time be made to do something on windows, it makes you appreciate what a nice and powerful environment for software development *nix is (really, cmd.exe is a pathetic excuse for a shell, and any time you want do anything slightly more than trivial with MSVC, you end up using it and cursing it).

Third, as much as simple and integrated working on an established project with MSVC can be, and as much as unpleasant autofoo stuff is time from time, setting up even a quite small project in MSVC makes you realize that all that lovely GUI is in fact pretty unproductive when it comes to controlling project and sub-project settings — you end up having to go through endless combo boxes and all sorts of confirmation dialogues, thinking ‘this would be just a one line change in configure.ac’ (I reckon that half of the time it took to set up was spent clicking the GUI).

It would be nice to have some alternative build system for windows to the MSVC, like Dev-C++ + mingw project, if some felt like contributing it (or perhaps some truly hardcore autofoo hacker can manage to use the existing autofoo setup, who knows).

So, we already have clutter running on the Mac OSX, and yesterday, after little bit effort, I got clutter running on Windows; in case anybody doubts me, the obligatory screen shot is here (click it for more): .

Once I got the necessary dependencies set up (mostly thanks to all the ready made packages provided by Tor Lillqvist, building clutter 0.4.2 using MSVC turned out quite straight-forward, and only a handful of modifications to the sources was needed; some tweaking is still needed to make the build process work out of the box, but you can expect the project files soon.