[Ack. Forgot to reply-to-list, and ran into the list's bad handling of gmail addresses again. So sorry for possible multi-posts.]

I agree that our GUI story is still bad.

But I don't understand what chromium has to do with either game dev or a good GUI story? If I want to write a real game, I use SDL2 bindings. If I want to write a website, I use something like Yesod. If I want to write browser games or "dynamic web sites", I throw JavaScript libraries at the walls, see what sticks, call it "modern coding", go to the liquor store and reconsider my life.

All joking aside, it's nice to see someone take a different path than usual, organization-wise. I do disagree on the technical path though. We already have a lot of bindings to several cross-platform frameworks and libraries, including QT, GTK, FLTK, and the aforementioned SDL2. But they suffer from impedance mismatch and lack of use and thus, community support. To solve that I would say what we need is a nice middle layer to translate functional thinking into framework models. We do have the diagrams package for describing static diagrams in a functional way, but it largely lacks dynamic behavior. (There's some support for animations, but it doesn't fill me with confidence.) We also have several attempts at FRP libraries for dynamic behavior, but few interactions with bindings. What is still missing is something like a dynamic version of diagrams that is based on one of these FRP libraries and that can work with one or several of the bindings as a back-end – possibly with a Haskell-side widget library. Possibly with css-like runtime styling And if we have that, yeah, we can add chromium bindings or whatever. Or write our own browser engine for fun. As far as I know there were several attempts but all fizzled out at some point.

My own favorite approach goes even further. I propose that many of the problems arise because the existing frameworks impose too many non-functional ideas, so the "purest" way to go forward would be a fresh framework on the basis of only SDL and reactive banana. That might sound like overkill for a simple non-game GUI, but is it really if the alternative is a whole browser? And what's more, that approach could be pursued in a way that might be turned into the one mentioned above later on.

What these approaches need is not more c tools or more cross-platform shenanigans, but some ideas how to handle a complex dynamic tangle of widget trees in a generic, functional fashion. Which to me has the added benefit of sounding much more like "fun". So I'm still working on that second approach whenever I have some time, but like yours, my time is limited.

Be assured, I don't want to diminish your work, it's probably useful to a certain subset of programmers. What I'm disputing is just if it's the single best way forward.

Cheers,
MarLinn

Hey

I'm interested in making gamedev in haskell more viable and one thing
that I believe is missing in that part of the environment is a good
GUI story. So I decided to create proper bindings to cef3, you can
check out what I've done so far [here][1]. In this current version
I basically took the work done by Daniel Austin [here][2] split it
into parts to prevent my machine from dying from lack of memory and
packed it up with some nix glue for convenient usage. Now all this
doesn't look like much but it sill took me much more time then I'm
willing to admit in public. That's one of the eternal truths of
software development, that everything always takes an order of
magnitude more time then you suspect it would.

Anyway, what I would like to do here is add support for all platforms.
Create some nice scripts that help with automatizing building,
developing and deployment of code with this library for users.
Possibly write a script that automatically generates bindings from
c headers to bring this lib up to speed with the current version of
cef. Write some proper guides on using this lib for creating game GUI
or standalone desktop application. All of that is nice and well to
wish for but it is quite a lot of frankly not very fun work. If I had
to choose I would rather spend my time working on either something fun
or something that pays the rent, so usually at this point I stop and
walk away. But this time I decided to go about it differently, and ask
for community support. I have set up a BountySource campaign [here][3]
so I could focus on making this happen. Alternatively, if that's your
thing, I have set up a bitcoin address [4].

Depending on how well this campaign will go I'm also planing on
creating a full 2D game engine... but yeah, that's in the future.

So yeah, if you'd like to help me build this please support me.

Thanks,
Max.

[1]: https://github.com/haskell-ui/cef3-raw
[2]: https://github.com/fluffynukeit/bindings-cef3
[3]: https://salt.bountysource.com/teams/haskell-ui
[4]: 1LskxSUyLDLpMCBfUUnqcRT8mEFMW511Eq

PS. I have also created a reddit thread for this proposal here.

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