Re: [Caml-list] Does LablTk have a future?

[Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com>]

On Tuesday 30 August 2005 13:22, David MENTRE wrote:
> 2005/8/30, Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com>:
> > Incidentally, OpenGL is extremely important for us. So a GUI toolkit must
> > be able to handle OpenGL widgets. Indeed, this begs the question: why not
> > do the whole thing in OpenGL?
>
> Because printing and PDF rendering is not easy.

Why do you think that?

> And because you loose 
> the ability to have native interface on all paltforms (Gnome, KDE,
> Windows 2k, Windows XP, MacOS X, ...).

Yes but we gain the ability to have a better interface on all platforms.

> As somebody else pointed out, the ocaml binding to Cairo library could
> be used as underlying framework

I'd rather go entirely OCaml except for the lowest level stuff. Writing 
bindings is just too tedious and error prone and I'm not convinced that 
there's anything sophisticated enough out there that it would be worth the 
hassle. We can certainly improve upon Cairo and I have only had bad 
experiences with other widget sets (e.g. Qt, wxWindows).

> but you still don't have native platform GUI style.

It might be nice to allow native GUI dialog boxes (e.g. load and save) but, 
beyond that, I'd be happy to have non-native provided it was more aesthetica 
than the native GUIs.

Also, we'd need the library to be free for commercial use.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
Objective CAML for Scientists
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists