If these said libraries let us write a good API on top, then perfect! The problem is to actually pick the ones fulfilling our needs I think, all the major candidatures have pretty serious drawbacks, AFAIK.
On Sat, Oct 5, 2013 at 12:36 AM, Robin KAY <komad...@gekkou.co.uk> wrote: > 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<http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe> > -- Alp Mestanogullari
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