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Interesting architecture, having the core communicate with the GUI front-end over pipes via JSON. That certainly eliminates a whole class of pain around inter-l

Interesting architecture, having the core communicate with the GUI front-end over pipes via JSON. That certainly eliminates a whole class of pain around inter-language glue. Any idea what language and APIs the Windows version will use? All of the Microsoft-sanctioned choices for desktop apps (as opposed to the wanna-be mobile/tablet platform introduced with Windows 8) are kind of sucky.

raphlinus 11y ago
I've been playing a bit with the various choices (there are so many!) and am leaning in the direction of C# + WPF + Windows.System.Media for the text drawing. Using something based on DirectWrite rather than GDI+ is important to me because of text rendering quality. I have basically ruled out Windows Universal because it feels a lot clunkier. But I'm very much open to ideas from more experienced Windows devs who understand the tradeoffs better.
- mwcampbell 11y ago
  WPF left a bad taste in my mouth because, as far as I can tell, it hastened the obsolescence of my brother's laptop around 2011. [1] But then, maybe WPF 4 under Windows 7 would have been better on the same hardware. Impossible to say now. The best solution would probably be one that uses both DirectWrite and Direct2D. WPF 4 uses DirectWrite, but AFAIK, it's still on top of the older Direct3D-based milcore graphics system. But to use both DWrite and D2D, I guess you'd have to get down and dirty with C++, or at least use a lot of P/Invoke and COM interop in your C# code. To be honest, I don't understand why GDI isn't good enough. Can you explain what you find lacking in GDI's text rendering, or point me at an existing explanation? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8444494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8444494
  - raphlinus 11y ago
    The main thing I'd add to http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/font-rendering-gdi-versus-directwrite http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/font-rendering-gdi-vers... is that DirectWrite looks very smooth on high-dpi displays while GDI+ is quite grainy.
lomnakkus 11y ago
> Interesting architecture, having the core communicate with the GUI front-end over pipes via JSON. That certainly eliminates a whole class of pain around inter-language glue. If my experience is anything to go by, then it also introduces a whole new class of pain around gluing things together. You can alleviate a lot of it by using a real and backward/forward compatibly extensible(!) schema language for the interchange language. Your interchange language should also support some form of 'algebraic data types' just for maintaining general sanity.
- fpoling 11y ago
  Both Google Protocol buffers and Apache Thrift (originated at Facebook) both offers backward/forward compatibility that works and product/union types. They are especially nice to use for intercommunication between tightly-coupled components. I personally like Thrift as it can use JSON or plain text (perfect for debugging) or whatever, not just a binary encoding of communication messages and its type system is IMO slightly easier to work with.

raphlinus 11y ago

I've been playing a bit with the various choices (there are so many!) and am leaning in the direction of C# + WPF + Windows.System.Media for the text drawing. Using something based on DirectWrite rather than GDI+ is important to me because of text rendering quality. I have basically ruled out Windows Universal because it feels a lot clunkier. But I'm very much open to ideas from more experienced Windows devs who understand the tradeoffs better.

mwcampbell 11y ago
WPF left a bad taste in my mouth because, as far as I can tell, it hastened the obsolescence of my brother's laptop around 2011. [1] But then, maybe WPF 4 under Windows 7 would have been better on the same hardware. Impossible to say now. The best solution would probably be one that uses both DirectWrite and Direct2D. WPF 4 uses DirectWrite, but AFAIK, it's still on top of the older Direct3D-based milcore graphics system. But to use both DWrite and D2D, I guess you'd have to get down and dirty with C++, or at least use a lot of P/Invoke and COM interop in your C# code. To be honest, I don't understand why GDI isn't good enough. Can you explain what you find lacking in GDI's text rendering, or point me at an existing explanation? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8444494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8444494
- raphlinus 11y ago
  The main thing I'd add to http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/font-rendering-gdi-versus-directwrite http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/font-rendering-gdi-vers... is that DirectWrite looks very smooth on high-dpi displays while GDI+ is quite grainy.

lomnakkus 11y ago

> Interesting architecture, having the core communicate with the GUI front-end over pipes via JSON. That certainly eliminates a whole class of pain around inter-language glue. If my experience is anything to go by, then it also introduces a whole new class of pain around gluing things together. You can alleviate a lot of it by using a real and backward/forward compatibly extensible(!) schema language for the interchange language. Your interchange language should also support some form of 'algebraic data types' just for maintaining general sanity.

fpoling 11y ago
Both Google Protocol buffers and Apache Thrift (originated at Facebook) both offers backward/forward compatibility that works and product/union types. They are especially nice to use for intercommunication between tightly-coupled components. I personally like Thrift as it can use JSON or plain text (perfect for debugging) or whatever, not just a binary encoding of communication messages and its type system is IMO slightly easier to work with.