Here's a thought I had that would shallow out the learning curve for development of AROS/Amiga. It's a far out idea so it will take probably a few years to implement but it will be worth it.

Here it is: Why don't we make a graphical development toolchain based on a filesystem, Workbench/Wanderer and the shell in order to make an object-oriented rapid application development environment?

Here's how it should work: There should be a filesystem called the project filesystem. Each field in the filesystem would be a variable and the filesystem flags would be its properties, indicating whether it's read-only, write-only, and if it is a script. A script would be based on the Amiga/AROS Shell scripting language with a few extensions for adding support for reading in shared libraries and executing the code from them.

Problems: The Set/SetEnv and their Get counterparts would need to be modified to handle integer and floating point primitives in addition to strings. The filetypes would have to be able to identify variable and class datatypes with a prefabricated icon and properties. LLVM or some other compiler framework would have to be brought in to handle such abstract work.

There are sure to be other pitfalls such as a retooled EVAL command needed, but as a difficult-to-implement idea, tell me what you think.

@SamuraiCrow
I don't know how you manage to work in the term LLVM into 90% of your posts, it's getting kinda repetitive.

Other than that, it's a decent idea. Have you taken a look at MUI Builder yet? Could be a good starting point for the GUI side of this RAD environment you're proposing.

I haven't looked at MuiBuilder code yet but I was considering using it.

The part I consider to be the hardest will be converting the Shell scripting to be compilable and capable of dealing with all of the primitive types of C.

I'm dragging this thread up because I've since looked at MUI builder and it looks very buggy to me. Is there nobody who can build a decent GUI builder for AROS?

Quote:

The AROS port of MUIBuilder can't work because the code generators need a shared library which isn't available for AROS. The source code for that library is missing.

We can:
- try to reverse engineer the missing library
- use the a68k port of MUIBuilder (maybe the C code generator needs fixes for AROS)

Since we have the source to MUI Builder for AROS, it shouldn't be too much effort to figure out what the shared library did. I'd opt for reverse engineering the library given the choice.

If it works from 68k, maybe we could just disassemble the existing code from its shared library.

I'll have to do some looking.