Dear Alp,
Alp Mestanogullari wrote:
[snip]
I have been willing to have a nice GUI DSEL with good aesthetics for a
while. I think the hardest part wouldn't be the API, but really what
library we use underneath so that it's cross-platform and easy to
install for everyone. But I would love for something like that to
happen and am very interested in this.
Herein lies, for my purposes, the downfall of attempts to build GUI
tool-kits on top of a blank canvas. From the perspective of binding to
the platform, getting the basic functionality of a cross-platform GLUT
or SDL equivalent isn't terribly difficult. You can layer your own
widget system on top but even if you don't care about native look and
feel (and I don't particularly), there are still three big functionality
hurdles in my mind to building serious applications:-
i) Proper text rendering is more difficult than placing one glyph after
another on a line. You need to bind to each platform's text rendering
engine: Pango/others, Uniscribe, and Core Text.
ii) Proper text input is more difficult than listening for key press and
release events. You need to bind to the each platform's input method
system: XIM/IBus/others, IMM, and NSTextInputClient.
iii) Proper accessibility is just difficult.
There are plenty of applications where that doesn't matter and there are
lots of attractive things about a pure Haskell implementation with
beautiful high-level API. However, from my perspective, there are also
attractions to outsourcing as much of that work as possible to existing
libraries on the other side of the FFI even though that seems to bring
us down to lower-level.
Regards,
--
Robin KAY
_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
