Support for Panther

[Shaun Wexler]

On Jun 27, 2006, at 2:19 PM, Steve Albin wrote:

> It may be obvious to everyone but me,  but I am assuming that this  
> talk of not supporting Panther in future Valentina releases refers  
> to development environments only.
>
> Dropping support for Panther means only developers will need to  
> upgrade to Tiger and not end users of our apps, correct?

No, this means all users of the new "All-In-One" VLight.dylib would  
require Tiger or greater to run apps which use the new streamlined  
libraries, or lose some functionality when run on Panther.  App's  
would have to include the full set of ICU library files and  
individual Valentina dylib's to run as-is on Panther.

FYI, I created the VX project to build an efficient Enterprise  
Objects layer atop the already-fast Valentina engine, and make it  
even faster.  In combining VShared and VKernel, as well as utilizing  
the ICU library which is built into Tiger, Valentina.framework is  
embeddable into app's at only 21 MB total, and enjoys faster internal  
function calls because VShared base classes are statically linked  
with VKernel.

Ruslan is taking my initial work on VX a step further, and is  
rewriting the core unicode string classes to use C-function calls of  
the native ICU, rather than ICU's own C++ wrapper classes, and in  
doing so, he has removed some dispatch and wrapper overhead from  
FBL::String.  The current stumbling point is that the ICU lib  
included in Panther does not have case-sensitive unicode Regular  
Expression matching which is required for non-Western language  
encodings, but it does appear in Tiger.

-- 
Shaun Wexler
MacFOH
http://www.macfoh.com