From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id RAA30429 for caml-red; Tue, 6 Feb 2001 17:51:01 +0100 (MET) Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id KAA31717 for ; Tue, 6 Feb 2001 10:30:34 +0100 (MET) Received: from pauillac.inria.fr (pauillac.inria.fr [128.93.11.35]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.10.0) with ESMTP id f169ShL29826; Tue, 6 Feb 2001 10:28:43 +0100 (MET) Received: (from xleroy@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id KAA20554; Tue, 6 Feb 2001 10:28:42 +0100 (MET) Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 10:28:42 +0100 From: Xavier Leroy To: Daniel Ortmann Cc: caml-list@inria.fr Subject: Re: OCaml's long range graphical direction? Message-ID: <20010206102842.A27059@pauillac.inria.fr> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0i In-Reply-To: ; from ortmann@us.ibm.com on Mon, Feb 05, 2001 at 11:48:28AM -0600 Sender: weis@pauillac.inria.fr > Xavier, > Please speculate on the future development direction of graphical support > in OCaml. > Do you anticipate both Tk and GTk being supported? > Do you anticipate GTk support being ultimately more desirable and supported > than Tk? If so, what are some of the reasons? I'm definitely the wrong person to ask, since I have never written a full GUI for a program in all my life :-) Other members of the OCaml development team are much more qualified to answer your questions. Still, let me play pointy-haired boss and comment on things I don't fully understand. I expect the Caml-TK interface to be supported (and included in the standard OCaml distribution) for quite a while, but not actively developed. TK itself is quite stable and is available for many platforms: Unix, Windows, and MacOS. TK does well what it's been designed to do: write quickly simple GUIs. It starts to break apart for really complex GUIs, as the development of the MMM Web browser demonstrated. I've heard lots of good things about GTK, and it looks more powerful than TK, so it might be the wave of the future. However, it is my impression that the Windows port of GTK is lagging behind. Also, the Caml-GTK interface is still actively developed and hence might be less stable than the Caml-TK interface. > To what degree does threading affect the answer? No idea. I've heard plenty of claims that multithreading helps building good GUIs (see e.g. BeOS), yet most popular GUIs (including TK and I think GTK too) seem to manage fine without multithreading. If multithreading is a requirement, OCaml could probably cope with it using the "systems" thread library. Let us hear what other members of this list think about this. - Xavier Leroy