I'm a little confused.

No one is saying that using GTK for Lazarus forbids the use of pure Lib functions in specialist functions, are they?

How much cross platform compatibility do people want anyway? I'd love to be able to go :

Form:= TForm.Create;
Form.Show;

and have a form show on each platform. I'd like it if they look roughly the same size, and it would be great if the resizing worked similarly under Windows & X.

However, if I want to do stuff in Lazarus that needed Windows API calls in Delphi, I would expect to have to use XLib calls under X and WinAPI calls under Windows. I wouldn't expect this to be compatible. I think you can do this using just GTK.

When it comes down to it, I would much prefer a Lazarus totally tied to GTK and X, with no cross platform compatibility than have no Lazarus at all.

Anyway, if we make all our base classes abstract, we should be able to write other versions later, if we want. Look at the database stuff in Delphi for this. That was originally BDE based, then the ancestor classes got virtualised (Is that a word?) and look at all the database components you can get now - all of which remain pretty much compatible with the BDE stuff.

Isn't Object Oriented Develpoment great? *S*.

Meanwhile, while we talk, Cliff & Shane continue to write code, which I still haven't tried.......

Nick Lothian