Matthew Liberty wrote:

Greetings,

I've been looking at http://www.haskell.org/libraries/#guis and trying to figure out which package is "best" for building a gui. Can anyone give a comparison of the strengths/weaknesses of these packages (or any others)?

Hi Matt, When Manuel's Haskell GTK+ binding (gtkhs) is finished it will be really cool. On top of gtkhs there are/will be many other libraries and tools: - iHaskell: a high level GUI library that avoids the eventloop mess. - GtkGLArea: 3D graphics in your GTK+ application using Sven's HOpenGL. - GUI painter: All you need is a backend for Glade. I'm currently working on this. Or at least I was half a year ago, other (even more interesting) things claimed most of my spare time. Of course this will all take a while to come to a beta release. FranTk is currently the only high level interface that is in beta. There is no release for ghc4.08, but it takes only a day or so to get it working. In short: use FranTk now or wait a year and use gtkhs. The reason there are so many GUI libraries on the web page is that nothing ever gets removed. Most of the libraries are no longer supported. I only realized after making the table that it was a bit redundant, but since I spend 10 mins getting the stuff lined up properly (please don't tell me you have a proportional font) you'll have to suffer through it: +------------+--------+-------+-----+------+------+ | GUI lib | Status | Level | W98 | Unix | OS X | +------------+--------+-------+-----+------+------+ | TclHaskell | beta | low | yes | yes | | | Fudgets | alpha*)| high | no | yes | | | gtkhs | alpha | low | | yes | | | iHaskell | | high | | | | | FranTk | beta | high | yes | yes | | +------------+--------+-------+-----+------+------+ | Haggis | dead | high | no | yes | | | Haskell-Tk | dead | | | | | | Pidgets | dead | | | | | | Budgets | dead | | | | | | EmbWin | dead | | | | | | Gadgets | dead | | | | | +------------+--------+-------+-----+------+------+ *) I thought Fudgets was dead, but apparently it has been revived. You might want to check that out too, although it has the words "hackers release" all over it (literaly). Status: alpha/beta I guess "dead" sounds a bit rude. It means that I couldn't find a distribution or it would take too much effort to get it working. Level: low: Raw calls to C library. high: More functional style. W98: Wether it works on Windows 95/98/ME with ghc4.08. Unix: Same for Unix (Solaris in my case). OS X: Same for Macintosh OS X. Hope this helps, Jan