[Haskell-cafe] what GUI library should i select?

[Iván Pérez Domínguez]

Neil Mitchell wrote:
> Hi Bulat,
> 
>> afaik, there are just two good enough libs - wxHaskell and GtkHs. can
>> anyone point (or write) detailed comparison of their features? i plan
>> to write large GUI program in Haskell and want to select best one.
>> the requirements that i can imagine at this moment is the following:
> 
> I used to use wxHaskell.

So did I. I tried gtk2hs as well. In my experience, gtk2hs is more
complicated. On the other hand, gtk2hs supports glade, I think.

wxHaskell seems to be easier to understand and to use. In my case, I
took a reversi game from haskell.org and did a sudoku game in a few
weeks (with no prior knowledge on wxHaskell).

 I wanted to write a GUI program using GHC
> 6.4.2 and was (disturbingly) shocked to find out that _neither_ of the
> GUI toolkits had prebuilt packages that worked on Windows with GHC
> 6.4.2. I complained and within a day Duncan had done one for Gtk2Hs,
> and to my knowledge wxHaskell still doesn't have such a packaged
> version.
> 

I'm using Gentoo Linux. We obviously don't use prebuilt packaged
versions, but installing it is just doing "emerge wxhaskell" and
'playing the... waiting game'. Gtk2hs support under Gentoo is mostly
missing (the package is included, but doesn't work at all).

> For this reason, I would recommend Gtk2Hs - the level of support and
> maintainership is far better than wxHaskell at the moment. I
> appreciate wxHaskell has new maintainers, but when picking a GUI
> toolkit where you can't easily switch later, currently maintained is a
> big bullet point for me!