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What is Glk?

April 26, 2017glk

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What is Glk?

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It is a standard for text-based I/O, designed by Andrew “zarf” Plotkin. Complete information can be found at . Here is a brief description of it, plagiarized from LucFrench and Zarf’s descriptions on raif: GLK is a spec for porting Input/Output code across platforms. In order to understand why it’s necessary, one must understand a bit about I/O. A Unix machine has a different way of printing to the screen than a Mac, since one is primarily text based, and the other is a graphical windowing enviroment. As such, they have two *very* different ways of outputting data, particularly for some of the special effects that many high level IF systems need (e.g., a status line, picture, color, etc.). So, porting the I/O can be difficult. What Glk attempts to do is specify a set of calls to the Glk system that allows for easy porting across multiple platforms. The Glk calls are intended to be not only portable, but to be *easily* portable: abstracted in such a way