On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 8:03 AM, Michael Mossey
I want to choose a GUI library for my project. Some background: I'm a beginner to functional programming and have been working through Haskell books for a few months now. I'm not just learning Haskell for s**ts and giggles; my purpose is to write music-composition-related code; in particular, I want to write a graphical musical score editor. (Why write my own editor, you may ask? Because I want to fully integrate it with computer-assisted-composition algorithms that I plan to write, also in Haskell.) I decided to use Haskell for its great features as a functional programming language.
Regarding a choice of GUI library, I want these factors:
- it needs to provide at a minimum a drawing surface, a place I can draw lines and insert characters, in addition to all the standard widgets and layout capabilities we have to come to expect from a GUI library.
- This is a Windows application.
- it needs to be non-confusing for an intermediate-beginner Haskeller. Hopefully good documentation and examples will exist on the web.
- It might be nice to have advanced graphics capability such as Qt provides, things like antialiasied shapes, and a canvas with efficient refresh (refereshes only the area that was exposed, and if your canvas items are only primitives, it can do refreshes from within C++ (no need to touch your Haskell code at all). However I'm wondering if qtHaskell fits my criteria "well-documented" and "lots of examples aimed at beginners".
I've never used it myself, but if you're going to be drawing a lot perhaps cairo is right for you? http://cairographics.org/hscairo/ I suspect you'll have to be "self-taught" here. Gtk2Hs and WxHaskell are probably the most mature gui libs for Haskell. Yet with either one you may end up dropping down into GDI/GDI+ or opengl on windows to get what you want. GDI/GDI+ is confusing in any language, but good books/resources do exist. So perhaps the trick here is to translate good documentation from other languages/sources into Haskell examples. You could do this as a warm up exercise before starting on your music editor. Jason