From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from majordomo@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id EAA18982; Mon, 11 Aug 2003 04:02:13 +0200 (MET DST) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id EAA21407 for ; Mon, 11 Aug 2003 04:02:10 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from mail1.tpgi.com.au (mail.tpgi.com.au [203.12.160.57]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id h7B228T19344 for ; Mon, 11 Aug 2003 04:02:09 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from 203-213-83-171-syd-ts15-2600.tpgi.com.au (203-213-83-171-syd-ts15-2600.tpgi.com.au [203.213.83.171]) by mail1.tpgi.com.au (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id h7B21xO00694; Mon, 11 Aug 2003 12:01:59 +1000 Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Re: Tcl/Tk and RH 9 From: skaller Reply-To: skaller@ozemail.com.au To: erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr Cc: Matt Gushee , caml-list@inria.fr In-Reply-To: <200308110420.53523.exa@kablonet.com.tr> References: <1060394583.12630.4.camel@localhost.localdomain> <200308110215.42114.exa@kablonet.com.tr> <20030811004129.GB32383@swordfish> <200308110420.53523.exa@kablonet.com.tr> Content-Type: text/plain Message-Id: <1060567325.7474.66.camel@localhost.localdomain> Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Ximian Evolution 1.2.2 (1.2.2-4) Date: 11 Aug 2003 12:02:06 +1000 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Loop: caml-list@inria.fr X-Spam: no; 0.00; ozemail:01 caml-list:01 eray:01 ozkural:01 model:01 familiarity:01 gui:01 toolkit:01 generic:01 no-brainer:99 kde:01 abstraction:01 quirks:01 xlib:01 widget:01 Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk 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. ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners