Andrew Coppin wrote:
On 29/09/2010 07:33 PM, Steve Schafer wrote:
The issue isn't that there aren't a lot of Windows developers who have an interest in Haskell+GUI development. The issue is that nearly every Windows developer who looks into Haskell+GUI says, "This stuff sucks," and walks away, because they're interested in developing applications, not wrestling with GUI toolkits.
Yep, that's the one.
If you want to build a GUI application in Tcl, it's going to take a couple of minutes to throw together some Tk commands and you're done.
Right.
In Java, you'll have to write a mile of boilerplate, but there are wizzy tools that will write it for you. And I gather that if you've coding in C or C++ or C#, you can use VisualStudio to throw a complex GUI together in a couple of minutes.
Not so, at least with C++. I have used VS and C++, it is horrible. Never again.
How do you do that in Haskell? Well, you can either install and configure a complete Unix emulator and then compile wxHaskell from source (?!), or you can use Gtk2hs, which still requires you to manually install and configure GTK+ and compile the entire library from source code. And even then, your developed application will only run on Windows boxes that have GTK+ installed (i.e., none of them).
Can you not statically link the gtk libraries?
All of which is a far cry from "install IDE, click some buttons, run the wizzard, job done".
I never found that this actually works. Yea, you can get *something* running pretty fast, but as soon as you start to do stuff that is not 100% standard off-the-shelf, you are screwed. *This* is when things become *really* difficult. All this compiling and installing libraries stuff is harmless, compared to the problems caused by stupidly broken APIs and crippled languages. Cheers Ben