[Haskell] Haskell Xlib bindings

[Simon Marlow]

Sven Panne wrote:
> Am Mittwoch, 7. Februar 2007 20:51 schrieb Benjamin Franksen:
>> [...]
>> XCB implements the full protocol (which already makes for a daunting amount
>> of data types and routines). On top of that it implements a very lean
>> connection management and request handling API that allows (this is one of
>> the highlights) single-threaded as well as multi-threaded access.
> 
> Hmmm, the presentation in the paper is the other way round: The lower layer is 
> the XCB_Connection layer, handling connections, requests and replies. On top 
> of that, the XCB_Protocol layer implements, well, the protocol, including 
> (un-)marshaling to/from C.
> 
>> See the very readable paper
>> http://www.linuxshowcase.org/2001/full_papers/massey/massey.pdf
> 
> After reading that paper and browsing around a bit, I think a slightly bolder 
> approach might make sense for Haskell, in effect creating XHB ("X Protocol 
> Haskell Binding"): I guess that the bulk of the code is in the XCB_Protocol 
> layer, and that layer is already generated via an XML description for the C 
> binding. If we can use the same technique to generate Haskell code, "only" a 
> Haskell version of the connection layer would be needed to get a full XHB. 
> This would have a few advantages:
> 
>    * There is no dependency on the XCB library, so XHB should work on *any* 
> platform, including e.g. MinGW without any X11 libs. An X11 server is of 
> course still needed... :-)
> 
>    * Data is only (un-)marshaled once. Using XCB, there would be 2 steps: 
> Haskell <=> C <=> X protocol
> 
>    * The availability of protocol extensions is determined by XHB alone, not 
> by any underlying XCB implementation.
> 
> I am not sure if this is a realistic way to go, especially I am unsure about 
> the amount of work needed to implement the functionality of the 
> XCB_Connection layer directly in Haskell. Let's see if I can find a more or 
> less stand-alone version of XCB (with no need to build all of X.Org) and 
> understand how it is actually implemented.

This all seems reasonable if the goal is to provide an XCB layer in Haskell. 
But I have to ask the question: why?  The only user of the X11 lib is HGL, and 
that's been ported to GtkHs now (ISTR), so who are the clients for an XCB layer?

This isn't intended to be inflamatory, I'm genuinely curious - it's certainly an 
interesting exercise, if nothing else.

Cheers,
	Simon