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

[Eray Ozkural <exa@kablonet.com.tr>]

On Monday 11 August 2003 03:41, Matt Gushee wrote:
> > GTK on the other hand, isn't the top notch toolkit out there. The
> > technically superior toolkit is Qt *grin*
>
> Hmph. I suppose. I personally don't care for it because it's very slow
> on older machines, and causes XFree86 to lock up on some. Then there's
> the licensing issue on Windows. But better-designed? I guess it probably
> is.

With GTK, I would worry about its object model, library design, hack-ability, 
platform-independence.... The design of gtk seems fairly "backwards" to me. I 
remember how bad the C++ bindings were and I don't think the situation has 
changed much. This is not to say Qt would be a better "choice" for ocaml 
because that too is designed with an imperative PL with a not-very-cool type 
system: C++. However, it is more effective in that domain as evidenced by 
existing code...

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.

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.

Regards,

-- 
Eray Ozkural (exa) <erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr>
Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara  KDE Project: http://www.kde.org
www: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo  Malfunction: http://mp3.com/ariza
GPG public key fingerprint: 360C 852F 88B0 A745 F31B  EA0F 7C07 AE16 874D 539C

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