Re: [Caml-list] Cross-platform "Hello, World" graphical application in OCaml

[Ken Rawlings <ken.rawlings@gmail.com>]

On Wednesday 23 February 2005 03:57, Jon Harrop wrote:
>I'd suggest sticking to lablglut and writing your own GUI entirely using
>OpenGL though, as I have found this to be much more stable. I don't really
>think users will be too bothered by a slightly-different-looking GUI though
>especially if it looks better. :-)

I've been down this road myself. I posted an OCaml version of Conway's
Game of Life on my webpage [1] a while back that uses "Kog", an OCaml
OpenGL based GUI I've been working on. The Life application only uses
the label, checkbox and button controls, but Kog also supports
spinners and drop-down listboxes.

My experiences building Kog were overall positive. However, writing a
full-featured GUI from scratch is a lot of work, so Kog is likely to
remain a toy implementation for the foreseeable future. If there's
much interest in the OCaml community for this sort of thing though,
I'd love to work with a group on a project getting a full-featured
lightweight GUI up and running with OCaml, whether it be on OpenGL
directly, or one of the higher level vector libraries.

Speaking of GUI libraries, I'm looking into writing a higher-level
wrapper around the GUI parts of Harry Chomsky's OCaml-Win32
library[2]. If anyone has already done this (and made it available
under a LGPL or BSD like license) and I've somehow missed it, please
let me know and I'll contribute to your project rather than
reinventing the wheel.

Thanks,
Ken Rawlings

[1] http://www.kenrawlings.com/archives/2004/10/06/life/
[2] http://www.speakeasy.org/~hchomsky/ocaml-win32.html