Which windowing toolkit to use?

17 Jun 2009

      Hi all,

I intend to start coding the UI of the heap profiling toolkit I'm
working on [1] soon. I'd be happy to get some advice on choosing the
right windowing toolkit for this task. The main requirements are:

- portability and native look & feel if possible
- easy to distribute executables under Windows
- relatively slow code rot
- sane interface that doesn't need wild workarounds even if what I'm
doing is not trivial or elementary
- trouble-free source installation in case someone wants to contribute

As I see, at the moment there's no serious alternative besides GTK and
wx, so my question is which do you think is better suited to this task?
I have absolutely no development experience with GTK, and while I used a
bit of wx in the past (in C++), I'm not really familiar with it either,
especially not the Haskell bindings. I noticed that installing the wx
binding with user rights doesn't seem to work directly from hackage
(doesn't pass --user to ghc-pkg?), but it looks like a problem that can
be solved with some hand editing. I'm a bit more afraid of setting up a
development environment under Windows; is there any major pain involved
with either of these libraries if I use MinGW?

And how about their interface? Is there any significant difference? I'd
especially like to hear the opinion of someone who's reasonably familiar
with both.

Thanks,

Gergely

[1] http://code.google.com/p/hp2any/

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Patai Gergely

Alberto G. Corona

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Alberto G. Corona

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Günther Schmidt

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