rust-pushrod

Pushrod is a library that uses the SDL2 library to interact with the operating system, and uses OpenGL for the drawing layer.

Summary

The original version of the library was a callback-based library, but this has changed. The design philosophy was that callbacks were a better design, however, this uncovered several design flaws. First, passing in mutable references to the top-level object that caused an event was almost impossible without a series of cast objects. Second, performance suffered as a result of the custom code that was written to support said functionality.

After researching other libraries, it became obvious that using an event-based system was a better approach. Therefore, Pushrod now uses an event-based system to handle messaging.

The benefits to this are great - the main benefits being that each window now has its own event handler: every window that displays a new dialog contains its own window event handler. This allows for global access to the widget store, the containing object, and the event handler.

Developers who have written GUI applications on the Atari ST, Macintosh, Amiga, and other event-based GUI libraries will instantly feel at home here.

Installing on Ubuntu Linux

sudo apt install libsdl2-dev libsdl2-ttf-dev libsdl2-image-dev

Installing on Redhat Linux

sudo yum install libsdl2-dev libsdl2-ttf-dev libsdl2-image-dev

Installing on Mac OS X

Install Brew. Go here to get instructions on how to install.

Once installed, run the following commands:

brew update
brew upgrade
brew install sdl2 sdl2_image sdl2_ttf

Then modify your .profile and add:

export LIBRARY_PATH="$LIBRARY_PATH:/opt/homebrew/lib"

And you should be able to not only build the application, but you should be able to run the examples in the examples directory.

State of the app

This is the current state of the example app.