Re: [Caml-list] Re: Tcl/Tk and RH 9

[skaller <skaller@ozemail.com.au>]

On Mon, 2003-08-11 at 11:20, Eray Ozkural wrote:

> With GTK, I would worry about its object model, library design, hack-ability, 
> platform-independence.... The design of gtk seems fairly "backwards" to me. 

Me too, though I can't claim great familiarity with it.

> It is now going to sound "bold" to you people, but I don't understand why you 
> can't write the ultimate portable GUI toolkit in ocaml itself. With a 
> language as generic as ocaml it should be a no-brainer to efficiently 
> abstract over peculiarities of windows systems.

Yeah, that's a good question. The answer is probably: we could,
but who is going to finance it? Building GUI toolkit is a rather
large job (its difficult enough to *wrap* a toolkit).

> Besides, you will find that the limitations of those C/C++ based systems will 
> be severe. I can make an educated guess because I was designing an ocaml 
> binding for KDE... If you decide on some kind of binding to a "high level" 
> toolkit like gtk it's going to be some abstraction layer over black boxes 
> with a lot of quirks, it's not going to be pretty.

Sure, but where does one bind? To Xlib? To the X protocol directly?
If you bind that deep, how do you handle a Windows port of the library?

I personally think most widget kits are pretty bad, they're the wrong
idea altogether, especially the stupid callback/event loop paradigm.
I'd be happy to paint buttons myself, etc if the drawing and event
management tools existed in a standard form.

The problem, I think, is that they dont: its actually easier to
standardise widget functionality in the face of distinct underlying
drawing/event primitives/models. But I could be wrong, this isn't my
area of expertise.

OTOH: a portable clean standard Ocaml GUI would be a killer app..
it would make Ocaml the language of choice for deploying user
interfaces and GUI applications.


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