Re: [Haskell-cafe] Poll & plea: State of GUI & graphics libraries in Haskell

I think you've misunderstood Robin's point. The problem is that each of these libraries is platform-specific. Writing an api on top of one is work enough, but writing a cross-platform api that binds to the appropriate platform-specific backend is a major undertaking. On Oct 4, 2013 7:12 PM, "Alp Mestanogullari" wrote:

If these said libraries let us write a good API on top, then perfect! The

problem is to actually pick the ones fulfilling our needs I think, all the major candidatures have pretty serious drawbacks, AFAIK.

On Sat, Oct 5, 2013 at 12:36 AM, Robin KAY wrote:

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Dear Alp,

Alp Mestanogullari wrote: [snip]

...

I have been willing to have a nice GUI DSEL with good aesthetics for a

...

Herein lies, for my purposes, the downfall of attempts to build GUI

tool-kits on top of a blank canvas. From the perspective of binding to the

...

i) Proper text rendering is more difficult than placing one glyph after

another on a line. You need to bind to each platform's text rendering engine: Pango/others, Uniscribe, and Core Text.

...

ii) Proper text input is more difficult than listening for key press and release events. You need to bind to the each platform's input method system: XIM/IBus/others, IMM, and NSTextInputClient. iii) Proper accessibility is just difficult.

There are plenty of applications where that doesn't matter and there are lots of attractive things about a pure Haskell implementation with beautiful high-level API. However, from my perspective, there are also attractions to outsourcing as much of that work as possible to existing

while. I think the hardest part wouldn't be the API, but really what library we use underneath so that it's cross-platform and easy to install for everyone. But I would love for something like that to happen and am very interested in this. platform, getting the basic functionality of a cross-platform GLUT or SDL equivalent isn't terribly difficult. You can layer your own widget system on top but even if you don't care about native look and feel (and I don't particularly), there are still three big functionality hurdles in my mind to building serious applications:- libraries on the other side of the FFI even though that seems to bring us down to lower-level.

...

Regards,

-- Robin KAY

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-- Alp Mestanogullari

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