Re: Slang C API

["John E. Davis" <davis>]

John Eikenberry <jae@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>After digging through the code a bit I was wondering why the SLcurses part
>of the library wasn't covered in the documentation and considered a basic
>part of the C API. At the C level it seems that this compatibility layer

I first wrote the SLcurses interface to run many of the curses demos
that have been around to test the SLsmg interface.  Personally, I
think that the SLsmg interface is better than the curses interface;
hence I do not advocate using SLcurses.

>adds a higher level interface for certain things and would be very useful
>(particularly the window struct abstraction).

Although it does this, I have never found such abstraction useful for
my own programs, e.g., jed and slrn.  Both these programs use the
SLsmg interface to draw overlapping windows (menus, dialog boxes, etc).

>I'm basically curious about whether I could mix the normal slang C API and
>the slcurses C API. Any reason why this wouldn't work?

You can but do not mix the SLcurses API with the SLsmg interface.
Choose one or the other.  Again, I recommend the latter.

>Oh... one other unrelated question. Is the slang library thread safe?

I would not depend upon it.  Version 2.0 should be more thread safe,
but how much I do not know.

--John