Haskell GUI on top of Xlib?
Do there exist Haskell graphics/UI toolkits implemented on top of the X11 library (Xlib) without any intermediate C/C++ libraries (i. e. not WxHaskell for example)? I have a very low level client-side interface to the X11 protocol implemented in pure Haskell (layout of protocol packets obtained from Xlib header files preprocessed by HSFFIG). As of now, I can open a display, build request packets manually and parse server responses (some of, but this is just a matter of writing more parsers), so this is more like a toolset for X11 protocol packets manipulations. I do not intend to implement a full analog of Xlib in Haskell. Instead, it might be interesting to create a "fully functional" GUI toolkit based on some already existing high-level interface. Any ideas will be appreciated. Dimitry Golubovsky Middletown, CT
On Sat, 2005-11-26 at 00:17 -0500, Dimitry Golubovsky wrote:
Do there exist Haskell graphics/UI toolkits implemented on top of the X11 library (Xlib) without any intermediate C/C++ libraries (i. e. not WxHaskell for example)?
I have a very low level client-side interface to the X11 protocol implemented in pure Haskell (layout of protocol packets obtained from Xlib header files preprocessed by HSFFIG). As of now, I can open a display, build request packets manually and parse server responses (some of, but this is just a matter of writing more parsers), so this is more like a toolset for X11 protocol packets manipulations. I do not intend to implement a full analog of Xlib in Haskell. Instead, it might be interesting to create a "fully functional" GUI toolkit based on some already existing high-level interface.
Any ideas will be appreciated.
Are you aware of the XCB library: http://xcb.freedesktop.org/ It's a more modern client side X11 library. In particular they have a good infrastructure for describing the X11 protocol packets using XML. They use that to generate code in various languages for dealing with those packets. XCB is supposed to be simpler and more regular than Xlib and with less historical cruft. It is also supposed to support multiple threads properly (which is nearly impossible with Xlib). Indeed they mention that Haskell would be an obvious target for this: http://xcb.freedesktop.org/wiki/XCBToDo (see bottom of that page: "XCB for other languages") Duncan
Am Samstag, 26. November 2005 12:08 schrieb Duncan Coutts:
[...]
http://xcb.freedesktop.org/wiki/XCBToDo (see bottom of that page: "XCB for other languages")
"A problem occurred in a Python script." :-(
Duncan
Best wishes, Wolfgang
Thanks Duncan for this link: a very interesting reading. Duncan Coutts wrote:
Are you aware of the XCB library: http://xcb.freedesktop.org/
Indeed they mention that Haskell would be an obvious target for this:
I haven't looked at their API closely, but it would not be a problem to generate bindings using HSFFIG unless there are functions taking/returning whole structures, or things like arrays of function pointers which are not yet handled by HSFFIG reliably. It might be worth trying to model their algorithms in Haskell though. They send requests to server semi-lazily (i. e. when request's result is needed, or eventually when the queue is flushed), and retrieve server replies lazily (i. e. on demand). But I am not ready to tell yet, would Haskell's natural laziness be sufficient to implement that, or something involving mutable objects needs to be built on top of the standard I/O stuff. Dimitry Golubovsky Middletown, CT
On 26.11 22:00, Dimitry Golubovsky wrote:
Thanks Duncan for this link: a very interesting reading.
Duncan Coutts wrote:
Are you aware of the XCB library: http://xcb.freedesktop.org/
I managed to parse the XCB XML protocol descriptions to Haskell data structures, next I'll try to emit some nice code from that. If it works well the end result should be a pure Haskell X library. - Einar Karttunen
Einar, Are you talking about packet handling level only (i. e. same as I have now), or do you also have any of their transport algorithms (lazy request sending/response retrieval) implemented? Einar Karttunen wrote:
I managed to parse the XCB XML protocol descriptions to Haskell data structures, next I'll try to emit some nice code from that. If it works well the end result should be a pure Haskell X library.
Dimitry
Hi, Dimitry Golubovsky wrote:
Do there exist Haskell graphics/UI toolkits implemented on top of the X11 library (Xlib) without any intermediate C/C++ libraries (i. e. not WxHaskell for example)?
Fudgets is a GUI toolkit implemented in Haskell directly on top of Xlib: http://www.cs.chalmers.se/Fudgets/ Recent snapshots can be found at: http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~hallgren/untested/ -- Thomas Hallgren
participants (5)
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Dimitry Golubovsky -
Duncan Coutts -
Einar Karttunen -
Thomas Hallgren -
Wolfgang Jeltsch