[Haskell-cafe] Status of Haskell + Mac + GUIs & graphics

[Erik Hesselink]

On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 20:39, Gregory Crosswhite
<gcross at phys.washington.edu> wrote:
> On 5/20/11 8:35 AM, Jeremy O'Donoghue wrote:
>>
>> I would like to suggest, quite seriously, that the Haskell community try
>> to come to a consensus about supporting a single Haskell GUI, with a view to
>> distribution in the HP. Obviously my vote is for wxHaskell, but I'm quite
>> prepared to loose the vote. Reason is that I think we need to concentrate
>> some effort on getting one GUI binding to 'production' status, and I don't
>> believe that on the current basis we will ever do this. From my perspective,
>> only GtkHS and wxHaskell look like serious candidates with at least some
>> history and maturity behind them.
>
> If you are going to rule out Qt, then the only good cross-platform option
> remaining is wx since Gtk is not fully native on OSX but instead uses X11
> which results in an inferior user experience, and it would be a bad idea to
> have that be the standard that everyone associates with applications written
> in Haskell.

Note that it is supposed to be possible to build gtk2hs with gtk+osx,
which will not use X11 but use the native OS X GUI. I've not been able
to get this to work, but it's been a while since I tried. The Haskell
wiki mentions it doesn't support Glade, but does support Cairo. If
this were to work, gtk2hs would be a serious option as well.

Erik