Re: [Caml-list] Desktop GUI toolkits - current state of the art?

[Yoann Padioleau <padator@wanadoo.fr>]

On Nov 27, 2010, at 10:38 PM, Martin DeMello wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 12:39 AM, Yoann Padioleau <padator@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>> On Nov 24, 2010, at 1:38 AM, Martin DeMello wrote:
>>> 
>>> Both ruby and vala make an effort to provide nice syntactic support
>>> for gtk code, so that it looks like a natural part of the language.
>> 
>> Could you give some example of code explaining that ?
>> Code in vala/ruby  vs same code in lablgtk.
> 
> Here's the table packing example in ruby and ocaml:
> 
> http://ruby-gnome2.sourceforge.jp/hiki.cgi?tut-gtk2-packing-tables-demo
> http://plus.kaist.ac.kr/~shoh/ocaml/lablgtk2/lablgtk2-tutorial/x509.html

I honestly don't see any difference. Where do you see "nice syntactic support
for gtk code" in the ruby version ?

> 
> They both more or less follow the C API, but the ruby code looks like
> natural ruby (perhaps because ruby has a more imperative flavour than
> OCaml does), whereas the OCaml code looks there should be a more
> declarative, higher-level way of doing things.
> 
> Vala is currently experimenting with gtkon, a declarative layout
> language that embeds vala code "islands", and is compiled into pure
> vala by a preprocessor.
> 
> http://code.google.com/p/gtkaml/wiki/Gtkon
> 
> This seems like a very promising direction,

Again, I don't see the advantage of this JSON notation vs doing the same in plain OCaml.

> though I don't know how
> well an equivalent approach would work in OCaml.

In https://github.com/facebook/pfff/blob/master/commons/gui.ml
I've modified slightly the lablgtk API to be more compositional.

> 
> martin