TaoClassic

Tao Classic
Original author(s) Laszlo Merczel
Stable release 3.0-alpha / January 27, 2013
Written in C#
Type Software library
Website tc.insaneidea.hu

The Tao Classic is a C# library giving .NET and Mono developers access to popular graphics and gaming libraries like OpenGL and SDL. Tao Classic is the direct continuation of the abandoned Tao Framework open source project.

Design philosophy

The original design behind Tao Framework was quite simple: to provide a set of APIs which resembles the original C-based library interfaces as much as possible. Tao Classic is no different - the goal is to make porting application from C/C++ as easy as possible. Even if it means that there will always be other APIs out there, which will make coding more "OOPish", the above mentioned core design disciple of Tao Classic probably won't ever change.

Supported OSes

In current alpha phase, the project supports 32 and 64 bit Windows and Linux. Unfortunately, Linux builds are not publicly available yet.

In the end (probably for the first stable "3.0" release), the plan is to support the three OSes supported by the original Tao Framework - Microsoft Windows, most Linux distributions and Mac OS X.

Versioning

The original Tao Framework was dropped at version 2.1. As a reminder about the fact that Tao Classic is a continuation of an old project, its versioning has been started at version number 3.0 (to also mark a clean slate). Also, within Tao Classic, there are several subcomponents - one for each wrapped library -, which also have their own version numbers. The version number of these subcomponents is the same as the version number of the library they are wrapping. E.g. 4.3.0.0 for Tao.OpenGL, which provides OpenGL 4.3 bindings.

Current bindings

Tao Classic provides bindings for these libraries:

Project status

The project started in the late December 2012, so technically it's in an early phase ("alpha"). Development is constantly ongoing since then, currently done by a single developer. For now, the "release candidate" phase is planned for second half of February.

Licensing conditions

Tao Classic is open source software, licensed just like its predecessor, under the conditions of the MIT license.

References

    External links