[GUI] GUI meeting at ICFP?

[Krasimir Angelov]

--- Wolfgang Thaller <wolfgang.thaller@gmx.net> wrote:
> So I'm still in favour of platform-specific
> backends; but I wouldn't 
> protest too much if we opted for the Wx option after
> some more 
> discussion.

I continue to think that a library which supports
platform-specific backends will be much more flexible.
The HToolkit is designed from high-level to low-level.
First I deside which functionality I like to have at
high-level and after that I deside which primitive
operations are required at low-level. After
that all low-level primitives can be implemented for
each backend. We can use wxWindows as backend for our
first prototype. The main advantage of wxWindows is
that it is well designed and have good portability.
Anyhow if we deside to support low-level
platform independent API then this will allow for
someone to write other backends. 
    One of things which I like in the HToolkit is that
it is very thin layer over the platform specific GUI.
The wxWindows contains many classes which are not
intended for GUI:

  - generic classes - wxArray, wxArrayString,
wxHashMap
wxHashTable, wxScopedArray, wxScopedPtr, wxString
  - threads - wxThread, wxMutex, wxSemaphore, 
wxMutexLocker ...
  - database management - wxDb, wxDbTable, 
wxDbColDef ... - about 10 classes
  - wxInputStream, wxOutputStream, wxFile ... - about 
20 classes
  - other

We already have useful and functional replacements for

these features. The corresponding classes will remain
unused. Probably this is true also for Eiffel, Python
and many other languages which uses wxWindows (except
C++). The wxHaskell project uses only GUI part of 
wxWindows. The binding is made with wrapper functions 
written in C. The wrapper plays the same role as
low-level C API in the HToolkit. My proposal is to get
agreement on this API. The common API will allow to
merge low-level parts of HToolkit and wxHaskell and
then we can support both Windows, GTK/GNOME and 
wxWindows.

Cheers
Krasimir

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