lablgtk for Win32

lablgtk for Win32

[Jonathan Coupe]

Does anyone have any experience of using lablGTK on Windows? It seems like a
very powerful system, but gtk itself doesn't seem to be very actively
supported on Windows.

Jonathan Coupe

Re: lablgtk for Win32

[Chris Hecker]

>Does anyone have any experience of using lablGTK on Windows? It seems like a
>very powerful system, but gtk itself doesn't seem to be very actively
>supported on Windows.

I'm trying to get it working now.  I was having a bunch of problems with labltk hanging my Win9x laptop after running apps from the command line (or emacs) a few times, so I decided to check out lablgtk rather than attempt to find the problem.  :)  I've got most of the examples working with the toplevel, but a few crash (not sure why yet, but I think it's problems with the way I built it...the win32 makefile isn't kept quite as up-to-date as the linux one so I've had to manually hack on it).  I also have the lablgl stuff working with it, sort of.

I don't have the compiled versions working yet.  The combination of msvc's lame compiler command line and storing the absolute paths and the cclib parms of libraries in .cm* files turns out to be a pain, and I'm running into command line length limitations on Win9x with the cl.exe that ocamlopt spawns (so there's nothing I can do about it, except maybe hack the ocamlopt sources to create a response file or something).

In general, while I'm all for cross platform gui libraries in theory, I'm coming to the conclusion that they're just not ready for production work.  Your app is huge because it's not taking advantage of any of the built in controls, it's slow to display because it's huge and because it draws all the controls itself, you can't just distribute a single exe because it needs a zillion dlls (or you end up staticly linking the 5 MB of gui dlls), and it's sloppy looking because things aren't tunable to be "just right".  Not sure what to do about it, though.

I don't need a lot of widgets and whatnot for my stuff, so I may just write a simple single-window thing that sends mouse and key events to the app, and be done with it.  Seems like a waste of time when there are these other libraries, though.  For what it's worth, Swing for Java has the same problems...he apps take 100 years to load and they don't act clean or tight once they are loaded.

Chris

Re: lablgtk for Win32

[Jonathan Coupe]

Chris Heckewr wrote "In general, while I'm all for cross platform gui
libraries in theory, I'm coming to the conclusion that they're just not
ready for production work.  Your app is huge because it's not taking
advantage of any of the built in controls, it's slow to display because it's
huge and because it draws all the controls itself, you can't just distribute
a single exe because it needs a zillion dlls (or you end up staticly linking
the 5 MB of gui dlls), and it's sloppy looking because things aren't tunable
to be "just right".  Not sure what to do about it, though"

People who have worked with it have recommended wxWindows to me as a
cross-platform solution that works fairly well. I don't how many OS's it
covers. It's usable from C++ and Python at the moment, but maybe it's a sign
that reasonable performance is possible. (I think wx apps do tend to be on
the large side though.)

Jonathan Coupe

Re: lablgtk for Win32

[Jacques Garrigue]

> Does anyone have any experience of using lablGTK on Windows? It seems like a
> very powerful system, but gtk itself doesn't seem to be very actively
> supported on Windows.

Unison's win32 version is using lablgtk for its GUI.
     http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

You may look at how they did it, and they may have some comments on
the subject.

My belief is that GTK works reasonnably well on windows, while being
slightly non-orthodox in its support: what was ported is GDK, which is
a bit like an X11 abstraction layer, rather than GTK itself. This
should make maintenance easier.

    Jacques Garrigue
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jacques Garrigue      Kyoto University     garrigue at kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp
		<A HREF=http://wwwfun.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~garrigue/>JG</A>

Re: lablgtk for Win32

[Sven LUTHER]

On Thu, Jan 04, 2001 at 05:33:47PM -0000, Jonathan Coupe wrote:
> Does anyone have any experience of using lablGTK on Windows? It seems like a
> very powerful system, but gtk itself doesn't seem to be very actively
> supported on Windows.

I don't think this is true, i launched gimp on windows almost three year ago
(well it didn't go very far, since it searched for a home directory which i
didn't had defined, but it did work), and there are lot of windows-related
stuff in the changelog of the gtk1.1/1.2 versions, so i guess it is working
quite well, look at : http://user.sgic.fi/~tml/gimp/win32/ for more info and
try it out.

Friendly,

Sven Luther

RE: lablgtk for Win32

[Mattias Waldau]

I have been using GIMP on my Win2000 machine for 0.5 year, and it always
works, and I never had a crash. So I think GTK is stable enough.

If there is a problem, it is probably in the Lablgtk-layer. I also tried a
little to get it up and running on my win2000, but failed. Since I have a
Linux machine, I didn't put a big effort into it. Instead I use Lablgtk on
Linux currenlty, and hopes that there will be a easy to install lablgtk for
win2000 sometimes in the future.

I hope that Lablgtk will be a standard library of Ocaml.

/mattias

-----Original Message-----
From: Pierre.Weis@inria.fr [mailto:Pierre.Weis@inria.fr]On Behalf Of
Sven LUTHER
Sent: Friday, January 05, 2001 1:58 PM
To: Jonathan Coupe
Cc: caml-list@inria.fr
Subject: Re: lablgtk for Win32


On Thu, Jan 04, 2001 at 05:33:47PM -0000, Jonathan Coupe wrote:
> Does anyone have any experience of using lablGTK on Windows? It seems like
a
> very powerful system, but gtk itself doesn't seem to be very actively
> supported on Windows.

I don't think this is true, i launched gimp on windows almost three year ago
(well it didn't go very far, since it searched for a home directory which i
didn't had defined, but it did work), and there are lot of windows-related
stuff in the changelog of the gtk1.1/1.2 versions, so i guess it is working
quite well, look at : http://user.sgic.fi/~tml/gimp/win32/ for more info and
try it out.

Friendly,

Sven Luther

RE: lablgtk for Win32

[Brian Rogoff]

I've been free of Windows for a few months now but from what I recall and
have read all of the non WinNT (I guess that is WinX where X < 2000) platforms 
are a unstable with respect to GTK, so before blaming lablgtk or even GTK 
check your programs on some newer versions of Windows. If you use Win98 or 
Win95 and you can't tolerate unstable software you're in a quandary!

I agree that lablgtk (and CamlP4, and Pcre :) should be part of the prebuilt 
release, though I guess that lablgtk is still a work in progress so it may
be a bit soon for that. 

-- Brian

On Sun, 7 Jan 2001, Mattias Waldau wrote:

> I have been using GIMP on my Win2000 machine for 0.5 year, and it always
> works, and I never had a crash. So I think GTK is stable enough.
> 
> If there is a problem, it is probably in the Lablgtk-layer. I also tried a
> little to get it up and running on my win2000, but failed. Since I have a
> Linux machine, I didn't put a big effort into it. Instead I use Lablgtk on
> Linux currenlty, and hopes that there will be a easy to install lablgtk for
> win2000 sometimes in the future.
> 
> I hope that Lablgtk will be a standard library of Ocaml.
> 
> /mattias
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Pierre.Weis@inria.fr [mailto:Pierre.Weis@inria.fr]On Behalf Of
> Sven LUTHER
> Sent: Friday, January 05, 2001 1:58 PM
> To: Jonathan Coupe
> Cc: caml-list@inria.fr
> Subject: Re: lablgtk for Win32
> 
> 
> On Thu, Jan 04, 2001 at 05:33:47PM -0000, Jonathan Coupe wrote:
> > Does anyone have any experience of using lablGTK on Windows? It seems like
> a
> > very powerful system, but gtk itself doesn't seem to be very actively
> > supported on Windows.
> 
> I don't think this is true, i launched gimp on windows almost three year ago
> (well it didn't go very far, since it searched for a home directory which i
> didn't had defined, but it did work), and there are lot of windows-related
> stuff in the changelog of the gtk1.1/1.2 versions, so i guess it is working
> quite well, look at : http://user.sgic.fi/~tml/gimp/win32/ for more info and
> try it out.
> 
> Friendly,
> 
> Sven Luther
> 
> 

Re: lablgtk for Win32

[Dale Arntson]

I also am working on getting lablgtk working on NT, and would like to
see it included in the standard distribution. GTK as a cross platform
gui architecture, coupled with a sound odbc access library, would make a
very compelling development platform for a whole class of new users,
including me, who do not yet have all the necessary tools.

-dale
d-arntson@uchicago.edu

Mattias Waldau wrote:
> 
> I have been using GIMP on my Win2000 machine for 0.5 year, and it always
> works, and I never had a crash. So I think GTK is stable enough.
> 
> If there is a problem, it is probably in the Lablgtk-layer. I also tried a
> little to get it up and running on my win2000, but failed. Since I have a
> Linux machine, I didn't put a big effort into it. Instead I use Lablgtk on
> Linux currenlty, and hopes that there will be a easy to install lablgtk for
> win2000 sometimes in the future.
> 
> I hope that Lablgtk will be a standard library of Ocaml.
> 
> /mattias
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Pierre.Weis@inria.fr [mailto:Pierre.Weis@inria.fr]On Behalf Of
> Sven LUTHER
> Sent: Friday, January 05, 2001 1:58 PM
> To: Jonathan Coupe
> Cc: caml-list@inria.fr
> Subject: Re: lablgtk for Win32
> 
> On Thu, Jan 04, 2001 at 05:33:47PM -0000, Jonathan Coupe wrote:
> > Does anyone have any experience of using lablGTK on Windows? It seems like
> a
> > very powerful system, but gtk itself doesn't seem to be very actively
> > supported on Windows.
> 
> I don't think this is true, i launched gimp on windows almost three year ago
> (well it didn't go very far, since it searched for a home directory which i
> didn't had defined, but it did work), and there are lot of windows-related
> stuff in the changelog of the gtk1.1/1.2 versions, so i guess it is working
> quite well, look at : http://user.sgic.fi/~tml/gimp/win32/ for more info and
> try it out.
> 
> Friendly,
> 
> Sven Luther