I dream of mostly generated bindings for Haskell to the native windowing
toolkit.
Eclipse's SWT proves, this is a viable path.
See my proposal here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell_proposals/comments/9w7nk/adjust_the_swt_bind...
Sam Martin
Thinking of a parallel with Java for a second, is there a GUI library out there that's structured like Java Swing? Meaning, there is a GUI library that has a small platform-specific GUI foundation (e.g. a per platform implementation of the core AWT functionality) and the rest of the functionality is pure haskell?
Supporting cross platform guis is often a bit ... complicated. Java attempted to resolve their debug-everywhere nightmare with AWT by making the per-platform bit as small as possible, and building everything else in Java.
I guess in theory gtk and wxWidgets take on this support burden, but you do get some fairly hefty imperative apis as a result. Perhaps it would make sense to focus efforts on stabilising a small 'core gui' library that can act as the foundation stone for all manner of pure haskell gui libraries?*
Or perhaps this already exists?
Just a thought.
Cheers, Sam