Mentor

Joe Groff

Slava Pestov

Skills required

• Familiarity with Qt

Summary

Factor's UI is written in a home-grown, portable UI framework based on OpenGL. The UI framework has grown mostly in response to demands put on it by the Factor development environment and by the game frameworks, so it is very limited compared to more mature cross-platform UI toolkits like Qt. Developing a Qt binding and making it natural to use in Factor would make the language more appealing for mainstream cross-platform desktop development. Porting parts of the developer tool suite such as the listener, inspector, walker, and help browser to Qt would be an excellent proof-of-concept project to motivate the development of Qt bindings for Factor and help them grow their beard. If these ported versions grew mature enough to replace the UI framework-based versions, it would relieve a significant development burden from the Factor team in the future, and perhaps allow the existing UI infrastructure to specialize to OpenGL-intensive applications.

Binding to Qt will require either writing a small C shim around Smoke (which is the approach used by CommonQt), or else using a new C++ FFI (which is being worked on by Jeremy Hughes).