Recently, I had a question regarding running Cairo on VisualWorks 7.4. Is it possible?

I was curious, so I tied a bunch of balloons to my computer and set out on an adventure to find out. Here's what my journey looked like:

1. Fire up latest version of 7.7, load NewTextFind, as something to test with.
2. Look at prereqs, create parcels out of CairoGraphics, Pango, Weaklings, and NewTextFind.
3. Install 7.4.1 on Vista.
4. Copy all of the dlls for Cairo/Pango in my 7.7 image directory over to the 7.4.1 one. Copy the 4 .pcl/.pst files over
5. Fire up 7.4.1
6. Load Weaklings, Cairo, and Pango parcels
7. Run a bare bones Cairo test:

   
   p := Pixmap extent: 100 @ 100.
   
   p graphicsContext newCairoContextWhile: 
   
   		[:cr | 
   
   		cr
   
   			source: ColorValue purple;
   
   			paint.
   
   		layout := Pango.Layout text: 'Hi'.
   
   		cr
   
   			moveTo: 20 @ 20;
   
   			source: ColorValue cyan.
   
   		layout showOn: cr].
   
   p asImage

8. Discover that we added the method tag based library specification in 7.6; go look at the various win* methods on LibCairo, LibGDI, and LibPango, and put those values in the class definition libraryFiles: arrays.
9. Rerun the test. Giggle with delight when it works.
10. Load NewTextFind parcel.
11. Hit ctrl-l in a text field to activate it; discover that we also added the message #half in 7.6 (Cairo doesn't use it, just NewTextFind)
12. Add ArithmeticValue:

    half
    
    	^self / 2
    
    

13. Chortle and Chuckle again.
14. Go blog about it.

The End

Based on a true story. After discovering that CairoGraphics and Pango bindings for VisualWorks worked on 7.4.1 with minimal effort, Travis was last seen wandering off to bed...