Iván Pérez Domínguez wrote:
Neil Mitchell wrote:
Hi Bulat,
afaik, there are just two good enough libs - wxHaskell and GtkHs. can anyone point (or write) detailed comparison of their features? i plan to write large GUI program in Haskell and want to select best one. the requirements that i can imagine at this moment is the following:
I used to use wxHaskell.
So did I. I tried gtk2hs as well. In my experience, gtk2hs is more complicated. On the other hand, gtk2hs supports glade, I think.
OK, i feel like i need to give my personal opinion about this. I have been using Gtk2Hs since a bit more of a year now, and though i don't consider myself a GUI guy, i gotta say it _has_ been very easy to use for me. Most of the operations while reasoning in terms of the gtk2hs API summarizes up on: - Creating windows - Creating and adding containers into these windows with a specific layout. - Creating and adding objects (widgets) inside these containers. - Link widget-specific events with Haskell functions implementing the desired functionality. Each of these general operations translate to very well defined functions, making it a very concise and easy-to-use API imho; plus you have the automatic garbage collection feature. Besides that, you have plenty of very good documentation on the gtk2hs web site; even with a hoogle interface to search on the API. I really don't see where it is the complicated part.
wxHaskell seems to be easier to understand and to use. In my case, I took a reversi game from haskell.org and did a sudoku game in a few weeks (with no prior knowledge on wxHaskell).
I wanted to write a GUI program using GHC
6.4.2 and was (disturbingly) shocked to find out that _neither_ of the GUI toolkits had prebuilt packages that worked on Windows with GHC 6.4.2. I complained and within a day Duncan had done one for Gtk2Hs, and to my knowledge wxHaskell still doesn't have such a packaged version.
I'm using Gentoo Linux. We obviously don't use prebuilt packaged versions, but installing it is just doing "emerge wxhaskell" and 'playing the... waiting game'. Gtk2hs support under Gentoo is mostly missing (the package is included, but doesn't work at all).
We even have a gtk2hs darcs repository (optional to the stable package) version available on Gentoo through the Haskell overlay. Though we appreciate if you give us more detail about the 'missing' support.
For this reason, I would recommend Gtk2Hs - the level of support and maintainership is far better than wxHaskell at the moment. I appreciate wxHaskell has new maintainers, but when picking a GUI toolkit where you can't easily switch later, currently maintained is a big bullet point for me!
I agree.
Regards,