[Haskell-cafe] GUI library

Michael Mossey mpm at alumni.caltech.edu
Sat Aug 29 11:03:21 EDT 2009


I want to choose a GUI library for my project. Some background: I'm a 
beginner to functional programming and have been working through Haskell 
books for a few months now. I'm not just learning Haskell for s**ts and 
giggles; my purpose is to write music-composition-related code; in 
particular, I want to write a graphical musical score editor. (Why write my 
own editor, you may ask? Because I want to fully integrate it with 
computer-assisted-composition algorithms that I plan to write, also in 
Haskell.) I decided to use Haskell for its great features as a functional 
programming language.

Regarding a choice of GUI library, I want these factors:

- it needs to provide at a minimum a drawing surface, a place I can draw 
lines and insert characters, in addition to all the standard widgets and 
layout capabilities we have to come to expect from a GUI library.

- This is a Windows application.

- it needs to be non-confusing for an intermediate-beginner Haskeller. 
Hopefully good documentation and examples will exist on the web.

- It might be nice to have advanced graphics capability such as Qt 
provides, things like antialiasied shapes, and a canvas with efficient 
refresh (refereshes only the area that was exposed, and if your canvas 
items are only primitives, it can do refreshes from within C++ (no need to 
touch your Haskell code at all). However I'm wondering if qtHaskell fits my 
criteria "well-documented" and "lots of examples aimed at beginners".

Thanks,
Mike


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