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

I'm polling to see whether there are will and expertise to reboot graphics and GUIs work in Haskell. I miss working on functional graphics and GUIs in Haskell, as I've been blocked for several years (eight?) due to the absence of low-level foundation libraries having the following properties:

[Disclaimer: In accordance with the principle that the amount that one speaks should be in proportion to the amount one knows, about GUI toolkits I should say nothing . Just offering my thoughts, more on the side of

On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 9:02 AM, Conal Elliott wrote: things I know -- programming languages and their history -- than not!] When I first heard of perl (early 90s) the claim was that the same language ran on Unix and DOS. I was incredulous. Implicitly I believed that the only program that could run unchanged on 'never-the-twain-shall-meet' territory was something that tended to the limiting the null program: main() {} What perl showed and the benchmark set for all the following scripting -- Ruby, Python etc -- revolution was that the old idea of C's portability had given way to a new one. In the C world portability meant simply passively avoiding non-portable features, in the new scripting world it meant actively writing bridge code to reunite gratuitous differences: eg the 'universal newline' in some languages like python. In short: The C world had given up on portability. The scripting language world chose to bite the bullet That choice may be a bigger factor in their success than people realize. So my point for the GUI question is this: In addition to Conal's list

* cross-platform, * easily buildable, * GHCi-friendly, and * OpenGL-compatible.

there are two other current holy-grails to chase: a. Browser-Desktop portability: eg pyjamas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyjamas_%28software%29 b. Touch devices allowing for 'Natural user interface'[1]: Generalizing the 40 year old mouse-model to modern touch devices eg http://kivy.org/#home How difficult/doable is this? As I said, I am too much of an ignoramus to know. Hopefully the perl/scripting-language example will prompt more knowledgeable/capable persons to at least consider the possibility of chewing on a bullet… [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_User_Interface Rusi -- http://blog.languager.org