--- Simon Peyton-Jones <simonpj@microsoft.com> wrote:
| going to stop gtk+hs because of this". So it seems we are all | waiting for the critical user mass that makes our own beloved | GUI library (binding) the standard GUI library. For the sake | of Haskell, we can only hope that this will actually happen | one day. A sad side-effects of this is that most of us GUI | developers waste a tremendous amount of time. A paper is just | not worth the effort we put in writing the code.
I don't think we are waiting for critical user mass. We're waiting for critical *designer/developer* mass!
Before Haskell existed, there were half a dozen not-very-good lazy functional languages, roughly one for each research group. Haskell was born out of the realisation that our efforts were fragmented and duplicated by this language diversity. Perhaps the situation with GUIs today is similar.
What is necessary is for those who are enthusiastic about developing GUI technology to get together and hammer out a common design; and then co-ooperate in implementing and supporting it. The hard bit is for everyone to compromise enough to agree a common design. For that to be feasible you either need a fair consensus on the broad outlines, or enough frustration with the costs of diversity that everyone is prepared to make substantial compromises. I sense that the latter condition may hold. I'm not sure about whether there's a consensus on what a GUI library should look like to the programmer, but at least the current diversity means that there are quite a few more-or-less worked-out designs to serve as concrete starting points.
Speaking as a potential user of such a library, I would absolutely love to have a Haskell GUI library that was available in some form on each major platform was supported by a bunch of people, so I could have some confidence in its continued existence Its exact capabilities are less important: (a) I'd adapt my program to fit what was available, and (b) I'm sure it would evolve in response to user feedback. I'd accept compromises in functionality to gain portability; it'd be OK to have some platform-specific sexy bits. Worse is better.
As Manuel says, this process is already under way: the GUI task force.
http://haskell.org/communities/11-2001/html/report.html#sect4.3.1
But not much is happening on gui@haskell.org. Well, nothing actually. Most of the 63 people subscribed to the list are (like me) lurkers. But I bet that a small subset are knowledgeable enough and motivated enough to do the job.
My main purpose, in writing this over-long message, is to say again what a big service to the community it would be to agree a common design and to implement it.
Simon
I am completely agree. The development of the ObjectIO and HToolkit was very interesting to me because this allows me to compare GTK and Win32. I understand that independently of the external differences of these API-s they have mostly similar features. The main differences I found are: * The GTK cannot draw rotated text and rotated elipses. This depend on restrictions imposed from X server. * The Win32 backed lack powerful text formating features like these given from PANGO. * The Font families given in the GTK and Win32 are rather different. The font management are still similar on each platform. Probably there are also other differences but I hope that they are not so important. I don`t have any expirience with Mac platform and don't know how different is it. I expect to hear other opinions in gui@haskell.org mailing list. Krasimir __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com