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Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!att!chinet!patrickd
From: patrickd@chinet.chi.il.us (Patrick Deupree)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms,comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d,comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Wanted: Actor, Microsoft Windows Toolkit
Message-ID: <8511@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 22 May 89 23:05:05 GMT
References: <1072@koko.CSUStan.EDU> <2512@PEDEV.Columbia.NCR.COM>
Reply-To: patrickd@chinet.chi.il.us (Patrick Deupree)
Followup-To: comp.windows.ms
Distribution: na
Organization: The Whitewater Group
Lines: 46

In article <2512@PEDEV.Columbia.NCR.COM> rogerson@PEDEV.Columbia.NCR.COM (Dale Rogerson) writes:
>
>In theory I really like Actor, but in practice it fails.  It takes alot of
>memory to run Actor.  It is difficult to bind an application, i.e. make a
>stand alone program.  

    Sealing off an application is not so difficult once someone gets used to
it.  I mean, it took me a while to figure out make files and things like that
when I was working with C back on the good old unix systems at college.  The
main problem we've had with sealing off is that we have to rely on the resource
compiler, and that seems to be where everyone has a problem.  The other area
people seem to have trouble with is figuring out what classes to include in the
sealed off applications and which ones not to.  It's a little tough, but not
overly so.

>The smallest code size is > 75k and more realistically
>about 200k.  For my applications this memory requirement is excessive. 

	What code size are you talking about here?  If you're talking about
the EXE file, not all of that is loaded into memory.  If you're just talking
about what goes into memory alone, you won't find many applications (complex
ones that is) that use less than 100K of memory.  However, you are right in the
fact that it involves more binary size than a rmal C program might.  However,
the programs generally run fast when written in Actor and they are much
smaller in actual written code size.
 
>Actor does not do a good enough join of isolating one from Windows this makes
>it more difficult to use than I would like.  Learning to program Windows is not
>easy.  However, with Actor you must also learn Actor, OOPs, and Windows all at
>the same time.  This is even more difficult.  
>
>If you want to write Windows programs you will still need to get the development
>kit from Microsoft to really understand what is happening.
>

You don't really need the SDK to use Actor.  There is a book called "Programming
Windows" by Charles Petzold that describes most of the Windows calls you'll
ever need to make.  The only reason one would need the SDK is if they wanted
to create a DLL or DDE (Dynamic Link Library or Dynamic Data Exchange).  The
Petzold book, however, is much easier to read than the SDK manual and has C
examples that I've found easy to convert to Actor.

Feel free to mail this account with any questions you may have about Actor.
I'll be happy to answer them.

				Patrick Deupree