[Haskell-beginners] Why aren't David Harley's QT bindings more popular?

[Øystein Kolsrud]

I've been using qtHaskell for a spare-time project lately, and I think
it works pretty well. The documentation could be better, and I had a
little trouble during the installation of the package on Windows, but
it seems to work fine once you get it up and running. The
documentation on the QT site is great though, and that's where I look
mostly, but mapping the QT constructs to its qtHaskell counterpart is
not always straight forward. Also, parts of the QT interface is not
implemented yet in qtHaskell, and it's not documented what parts are
missing. I have run into situations where I have spent a lot of time
figuring out how to do something in QT only to find out that that
option is not available in qtHaskell. I've usually found workarounds
for it, but it can take a while to find a "working path".

I haven't had a look at any of the other libraries out there, so I
don't really have much to compare with, but a problem with qtHaskell
is that it's usage is very non-functional in nature, and a lot of it's
C++ background shines through into the Haskell code (for instance
management of constructors/destructors). But on the whole I am pretty
happy with it.

Best regards, Øystein Kolsrud

On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 11:31 PM, Michael Serra <mk.serra at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>   Recently I have been doing the usual beginner's search for the "best GUI
> toolkit" available to Haskell, and today I installed David Harley's
> qtHaskell bindings.  I was surprised to find they were easy to install (on
> Linux), and all the examples run flawlessly.  So I have two related
> questions: (1) has anyone out there used qtHaskell, and what was your
> experience; (2) why do these bindings seem to be a less-popular option than
> wxwidgets and gtk2hs?  I understand qtHaskell is much newer than the others,
> and so far its development appears to be a one-man operation; other than
> these obvious explanations, is there a bigger reason people don't seem to be
> using or discussing QT with Haskell?  I would have thought working bindings
> to such a useful framework would be a bigger deal.
> - m. serra
>
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