Re: [Caml-list] OCaml vs Ada and/or GUI options

[David MENTRE <dmentre@linux-france.org>]

Hello Adrien,

2013/9/11 Adrien Nader <adrien@notk.org>:
> I'm trying to get a list of things that people find bad in (labl)gtk.
> Would you be able to put clear words on what you dislike?

From past experiment, GUI of demexp OCaml application
(http://www.linux-france.org/~dmentre/demexp/latest-src/demexp-book-0.8.2.pdf
, look at part IV p. 90), about 5-8 years ago:

  1. Lack of documentation. LablGTK doc says "look at C GTK doc". But
the lablgtk binding changes things compared to the C API, so this not
a one-to-one mapping neither. And the "obvious" changes weren't so
obvious to me. A tutorial made by a Korean guy IIRC helped a lot;

  2. Verbosity of GTK: it takes a lot of code to put 2 buttons
together (probably not GTK specific). At one point I used the GTK
graphical tool (can't remember its name) to design the GUI graphically
and load it into OCaml as XML file. It improved a lot my productivity;

  3. As other said, GTK is dead end: bad support of non-Linux
platforms, not a lot of developers, etc.  It was very difficult to get
my labgtk application working on Windows. A windows developer helped
me a lot: picking the good versions of libraries, solve Windows
specific issues, etc. I couldn't have compiled my OCaml GTK GUI on
Windows without him.

  4. The use of callbacks everywhere looks to me like writing
spaghetti code. I still hope somebody will write an
API/Framework/whatever were one writes declaratively how the GUI
should react and interact with application code, and all the needed
code is generated automatically. Adobe had such a tool at one point
for its internal use (i.e. for its applications). I don't know if
reactive approaches would help in that regard.


To answer original Gour question: I don't think anything in the OCaml
world fits the bill (safe, available at long term, documented, big
user community, ...). Should I do the same thing, I would write the
GUI as an external process (probably in C++ Qt) and use a
communication protocol to control it from my OCaml program. Or maybe
use the binding with Tk, if the graphical aspect has improved.

I still hope that somebody will propose a sane environment to write
GUI apps. :-)

Best regards,
david