Steps to make the editor cross platform (Mono)

[Calin Leafshade]

Has anyone done any kind of analysis on this yet? I'm working on stripping out scintilla which is a native library and so far, so good. What else is there?

I think I remember there being named pipes for the debugger which is a windows-only solution so I suggest we replace that with a tcp socket solution which is pretty standard cross-platform.
I believe the debugger communicates in plain text so it should be a very easy swap with only the comm method being changed.

Is there anything else?

Tzachs? CW?

[Gurok]

Well, actual compilation is not cross platform. That would be the big one. There's about half of a .NET-based compiler that's used for autocomplete and stuff.

[Crimson Wizard]

Has anyone done any kind of analysis on this yet?

I think tzachs and SpeechCenter did, but I did not follow them much. All I know is that we should retain from invoking Windows API from the code.
Also, probably AGS.Native should be completely rewritten into C# (probably should be anyway).

[tzachs]

That's great news!

There was a discussion about it here that you might want to brush up on.

Other than scintilla, the natives dll is probably the biggest hurdle. Like CW said, it has to be re-written in managed code.

Also, there's a utility somewhere on mono's website that loads all the code and searches for mono compatibility issues.
I used it a few years ago and fixed some of the issues (search for mono in the code), but you will find more if you use it...

[monkey0506]

Also, probably AGS.Native should be completely rewritten into C# (probably should be anyway).

This.

I'm working and going to school full-time, so my spare time has been greatly diminished, but given the preliminary work I did in porting the room loading code into C#, I feel pretty confident that I could make some headway on this front.

[Eric]

What's your major? If you're in a CS class, and it's applicable, you might ask your professor if you can do it as an alternate to whatever final project you have. As a professor myself, I'm always happy to let my students do alternate projects that still satisfy the requirements of the course, especially if they have impact outside the classroom.