Platform Issues
The Euphoria programming language lets you create programs for Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD. Each of these operating systems can provide output via a graphical user interface (GUI). Generally, a GUI program written for Windows will not run in Linux. Likewise, a program written for FreeBSD will not run in Windows. Generally.
There are platform-specific GUI libraries and there are cross-platform GUI libraries.
If you want your program to work across multiple operating systems (or platforms), you will need to use "cross-platform" code. This is code that will run unmodified on multiple platforms. They usually require the installation of additional code libraries/files. Currently, there are two cross-platform GUI libraries available for Euphoria programmers:
If you want to code solely for the Windows platform, you can use one of several Euphoria GUI libraries:
For the sake of length and simplicity, this book will focus on the following libraries:
If you have not installed one of the above libraries, choose one now and click on the link for it above. You will be able to download and install the library from there.
Which one should you choose? For experienced programmers, I don't think you can go wrong with any of them. The only significant considerations would be cross-platform compatibility (wxEuphoria) and the availability of an IDE (Win32Lib). For beginners, Win32Lib is probably the quickest to set up. wxEuphoria requires the installation of a "shared code" library (*.dll in Windows, *.so in Linux/FreeBSD); however, it is easy to install and there's plenty of help if you get stuck. For beginners, it doesn't matter. We're just getting our feet wet and any experience with any of these libraries will help later when and if you decide to switch.
