Hi all,
It seems to me that the way things usually make progress is if
* a small group * writes a specification
I also believe that a small group would be good to get things started or otherwise there will be too much talking and too little working :-) However, I am currently wrapping up my thesis and will be too busy in March to contribute. Afterwards (April), I can do my share of work. Having said that, I would also like to express my doubts about the suitability of a common GUI specification -- I know, this is rather strange as I have been one of the main advocates for a portable API! I think that if we try to specify a full-fledged GUI API, it will be too much work to implement it on different backends. The API will be implemented partially, with bugs, misinterpreted, or not maintained. As examples of items that would make the implementations difficult are portable resource files, tool tips, tool bars, generic tree controls (on GTK), dockable windows, HTML (and openGL) rendering controls etc. Most are needed in larger applications and the lack of these items is one of the reasons that only toy apps. are written these days. Some people on this list think that we do have the resources to implement this all by ourselves, but I disagree -- portable toolkits like wxWindows and Qt have been in the works for years and with lots more development resources behind it, and even they have trouble supporting most platforms satisfactory. In my opinion, a common GUI specification only makes sense if we restrict ourselves to a simple API that supports simple (medium sized) GUI applications. A common denominator that is implementable with a reasonable amount of effort on many backends -- a bit like GIO and the current ObjectIO library. It would be good to have it, as it would create some order in the chaos of all the GUI bindings that are around now and give the user some hope of transferring applications easily between backends and platforms. On the other hand, it would always be a 'toy' API -- suitable for education and medium-sized applications (but I think that is the best we can do with such an API). My main point is that we should be more clear about the goals of the API as I feel that many discussions are just because of people having different goals in mind -- like the whole resource issue. All the best, Daan. ---- Another approach (that I favor) is to build a full fledged API on top of an existing full fledged library that is portable among all platforms. Libraries that come in mind are Java AWT, Tcl/Tk, Qt, and wxWindows. If Haskell is integrated with such library, it supports all gadgets you can ever wish and a Haskell developer will be on equal footage (is this english?) as C or Java programmer. Other "little" languages have chosen this approach too, wxPython and PythonTk are big examples, but we also have wxPerl, wxEiffel and Tcl itself. (Note that this approach doesn't preclude a common GUI API: the library will just expose more functionality.) One may worry that it is too much work to interface to these large systems (as the haskell GTK binding has proved), but in the end I think it is less work than trying to duplicate their efforts in Haskell. This is my main worry with the GIO/Port library: it is just a lot of work to maintain different backends and as soon as someone loses interest... I think that in some sense, the same happened to the Clean ObjectIO library, started out on the Mac, than Windows and now only windows is supported. (But it does show how useful it is to have at least some standard medium level GUI around!)