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Author Topic: LCS on a mac?  (Read 11453 times)

Stargrasper

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Re: LCS on a mac?
« Reply #45 on: April 11, 2012, 10:32:39 pm »

Hey, this topic looks old, but I have a suggestion.

If we (and by we I mean anybody who wants to take the extra time) could port LCS to Java, it would make it completely cross-platform compatible. I have some Java experience... It would just be a matter of using the Graphics text package extensively.

That may or may not actually be feasible.  There are certain capabilities of C++ that Java simply does not support.  I'm not sure if you've ever looked at the LCS code, but it's a tiny bit complex, but thankfully it's pretty reasonable.  I've seen a lot worse code than this.  It's not terribly well documented, so you'd need to know a reasonable amount of C++ so you can read it.  I'm also not sure how well Jonathan knows Java.  He's the defacto (if not official) maintainer of LCS, so it'd probably be bad if he couldn't work on it, even if he is transitioning to another project now.  Java also doesn't take kindly to the console and working with text in AWT/Swing/SWT is a bit tricky.  I suppose we could use jcurses or libjcsi for that.  The JVM is awesome.  The openjdk's JVM sucks, though.  You need the real JVM, and even that has issues between OS's.  I'm a reasonably skilled Java coder, I could pull this off.  I'm just not sure it's worth the trouble given that C++ is literally designed to "write once, compile anywhere".  So long as you have the tools, you can compile LCS on any of the major operating systems.  A Java implementation might be worse in that respect because you need tools to run it, not just build it.
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