On Tuesday 13 February 2007 14:15, Simon Marlow wrote:
This all seems reasonable if the goal is to provide an XCB layer in Haskell. But I have to ask the question: why? The only user of the X11 lib is HGL, and that's been ported to GtkHs now (ISTR), so who are the clients for an XCB layer? [...]
The conclusion of the above reasoning would be "rm -rf libraries/X11", but I wouldn't go that far... ;-) And similar arguments could be made for Win32. Anyway, I think there are a few reasons why something like XHB could make sense: * Fewer dependencies (no Xlib needed) * Automatic generation of almost all parts, leading to a very consistent API * Availability of dozens of protocol extensions for X11 for free, the X11 package has only the bare bones X11 * The possibility to use XHB in a multi-threaded setting (Xlib has only very arcane support for this, so everything is basically single-threaded) * Although Xlib will definitely stay with us for a long, long time, it seems to be a bit "deprecated". * The current X11 package needs a serious code review to fix the types. Apart from that, there are a few personal interests: * Improve my rusty XSLT skills * Test the available XML tools in/for Haskell * Get some ideas for a better networking package. BTW: What is the status of this? Is anybody already working on this? The current package has no clean layering, lacks most modern networking features, does a few things "behind the back" (which is often not what one wants), etc. Although I do not have enough time to push this actively, I would be very interested in joining such a "Let's build a better network package" task force... Cheers, S.