[Haskell-cafe] Poll & plea: State of GUI & graphics libraries in Haskell

[Robin KAY]

Dear Alp,

Alp Mestanogullari wrote:
[snip]
> I have been willing to have a nice GUI DSEL with good aesthetics for a 
> while. I think the hardest part wouldn't be the API, but really what 
> library we use underneath so that it's cross-platform and easy to 
> install for everyone. But I would love for something like that to 
> happen and am very interested in this.
Herein lies, for my purposes, the downfall of attempts to build GUI 
tool-kits on top of a blank canvas. From the perspective of binding to 
the platform, getting the basic functionality of a cross-platform GLUT 
or SDL equivalent isn't terribly difficult. You can layer your own 
widget system on top but even if you don't care about native look and 
feel (and I don't particularly), there are still three big functionality 
hurdles in my mind to building serious applications:-

i) Proper text rendering is more difficult than placing one glyph after 
another on a line. You need to bind to each platform's text rendering 
engine: Pango/others, Uniscribe, and Core Text.
ii) Proper text input is more difficult than listening for key press and 
release events. You need to bind to the each platform's input method 
system: XIM/IBus/others, IMM, and NSTextInputClient.
iii) Proper accessibility is just difficult.

There are plenty of applications where that doesn't matter and there are 
lots of attractive things about a pure Haskell implementation with 
beautiful high-level API. However, from my perspective, there are also 
attractions to outsourcing as much of that work as possible to existing 
libraries on the other side of the FFI even though that seems to bring 
us down to lower-level.

Regards,

-- 
Robin KAY