I looked at porting OMINAS to GDL quite a while ago and found about a million reasons why it wouldn't be worthwhile. I also got the impression the whole project was kind of defunct, so I forgot about it. However, Matt Tiscareno just emailed me asking about this possibility so I took another look and the project is still alive, so I think this is worth more consideration.
If I find the list of issues I encountered, I'll post it, but one of the issues was the widget stuff didn't work or maybe wasn't even supported at the time. That doesn't affect the core functionality of OMINAS, or even the rudimentary display tools, so such a port could still be very useful.
The costly IDL license is our Achilles heel, so it would be great if one day we could be fully in GDL, but it doesn't sound like that is realistic at present. However, I wanted to open this discussion for anyone who has any experience with it. Whenever I have more time to look into it, I'll post my impressions as well. If it doesn't look promising, at least we'll have a record of why.
From @jnspitale on July 7, 2017 23:17
I looked at porting OMINAS to GDL quite a while ago and found about a million reasons why it wouldn't be worthwhile. I also got the impression the whole project was kind of defunct, so I forgot about it. However, Matt Tiscareno just emailed me asking about this possibility so I took another look and the project is still alive, so I think this is worth more consideration.
If I find the list of issues I encountered, I'll post it, but one of the issues was the widget stuff didn't work or maybe wasn't even supported at the time. That doesn't affect the core functionality of OMINAS, or even the rudimentary display tools, so such a port could still be very useful.
The costly IDL license is our Achilles heel, so it would be great if one day we could be fully in GDL, but it doesn't sound like that is realistic at present. However, I wanted to open this discussion for anyone who has any experience with it. Whenever I have more time to look into it, I'll post my impressions as well. If it doesn't look promising, at least we'll have a record of why.
-joe
Copied from original issue: ppenteado/ominas#11