[Haskell-cafe] Which windowing toolkit to use?

Patai Gergely patai_gergely at fastmail.fm
Wed Jun 17 05:56:22 EDT 2009


Hi all,

I intend to start coding the UI of the heap profiling toolkit I'm
working on [1] soon. I'd be happy to get some advice on choosing the
right windowing toolkit for this task. The main requirements are:

- portability and native look & feel if possible
- easy to distribute executables under Windows
- relatively slow code rot
- sane interface that doesn't need wild workarounds even if what I'm
doing is not trivial or elementary
- trouble-free source installation in case someone wants to contribute

As I see, at the moment there's no serious alternative besides GTK and
wx, so my question is which do you think is better suited to this task?
I have absolutely no development experience with GTK, and while I used a
bit of wx in the past (in C++), I'm not really familiar with it either,
especially not the Haskell bindings. I noticed that installing the wx
binding with user rights doesn't seem to work directly from hackage
(doesn't pass --user to ghc-pkg?), but it looks like a problem that can
be solved with some hand editing. I'm a bit more afraid of setting up a
development environment under Windows; is there any major pain involved
with either of these libraries if I use MinGW?

And how about their interface? Is there any significant difference? I'd
especially like to hear the opinion of someone who's reasonably familiar
with both.

Thanks,

Gergely

[1] http://code.google.com/p/hp2any/

-- 
http://www.fastmail.fm - Or how I learned to stop worrying and
                          love email again



More information about the Haskell-Cafe mailing list