Hi all,
1- Forget about interfacing to Gtk,Qt,MFC,TK,WxWindows or whatever. Instead write the entire thing in Haskell (preferably), C (if necessary) and perhaps even the occasional bit of assembler for stuff that must really fly using MMX,Altivec.. Well, I think this the most extreme approach: Just use "setPixel" and "getPixel" to create fancy GUIs. Gtk does exactly this and does it quite well.
This "let's do it all ourself" sounds very much like the "not-invented-here" syndrome. Please realize that there are libraries out there which are free, portable, well maintained and accomplish all that what you would like to do from scratch. Gtk is one such example. Maybe the people who have a binding to offer (Krasimir, Manuel, myself,...) should give a quick overview of what they have and what the capabilities are. Here is my binding: gtk2hs - it has been tested on FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, MacOSX/XDarwin and Windows - automatic memory management: your program only crashes via Haskell exceptions (or if there is a bug in Gtk) - 90-95% of all widgets are bound, what is lacking is the binding to Drag'n'Drop, Selections, Clipboards, some Font rendering. Custom widgets work including the drawing primitives. - preliminary documentation (no data types, no type hierarchy, no nice layout) can be found on http://www.cs.ukc.ac.uk/people/staff/as49/gtk2hs/ - we hope to have packages available for the next release, especially for Windows, since there are a lot of prerequisites and libraries you need - we use c2hs and hsc2hs to generate the interface automatically - all functions are guaranteed to be bound correctly The URL of the project is http://gtk2hs.sourceforge.net/ Axel.