The future of Haskell discussion

[Manuel M. T. Chakravarty]

Wolfgang Jeltsch <wolfgang@jeltsch.net> wrote,

> That's why I 
> think GTK+ should be used mainly to develop applications which are intended 
> to run under GNOME and preferably not to do cross-plattform GUI programming. 
> I think the best solution for the latter thing is to use a library which has 
> multiple implementations based on different "native" libraries like Win32, 
> GTK+, Qt. wxWindows (http://www.wxwindows.org/) is an example for this kind 
> of library.

wxWindows is quite C++ centric and AFAIK nobody has made a
serious effort at a C++ FFI yet.  One of the big advantages
of GTK+ is that it was written with bindings for other
languages in mind.  Therefore, it is probably the toolkit
with the most language bindings.

One alternative would be to standardise on a kind of subset
of the GTK+ API and then somebody with a lot of spare time
could implement that on top of the Win32 API natively - in
the meantime, the original GTK+ libraries would at least
provide some form of implementation under Win32.  (You
should bear in mind that anything that doesn't build on
existing infrastructure involves a lot of coding and I
haven't seen many volunteers stepping forward yet.)

Manuel