Re: [Haskell-cafe] I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows.
On Fri, 01 Oct 2010 13:45:00 +0100, you wrote: I think that the issue is that making things better on Windows (and likely OS X as well) requires co-ordinated and agreed action across a number of areas. This means getting a moderate number of people, most of whom give up their time and effort for free, and for the good of the community, to agree on what is needed and to prioritize it in a co-ordinated way. The action needed by any individual might be relatively small, but without community agreement and action, the end goal cannot be achieved. Thank you. That's basically what I was trying to say: The project is too big for one person, or a small group of people. But it also can't happen unless there's a shared understanding of what is important and why it is important, and that's what seems to be lacking here. -Steve Schafer ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows.
On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 09:51:14 +, cas...@istar.ca wrote: I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows. Maybe this will help: http://wewantarock.wordpress.com/2010/05/05/haskell-platform-2010-1-0-0-and-wxhaskell-on-windows/ -- Eric Kow http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow For a faster response, try +44 (0)1273 64 2905 or xmpp:ko...@jabber.fr (Jabber or Google Talk only) signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows.
Apologies folks, rant coming up... On Wed, 29 Sep 2010 22:02 +0100, Andrew Coppin andrewcop...@btinternet.com wrote: On 29/09/2010 07:33 PM, Steve Schafer wrote: The issue isn't that there aren't a lot of Windows developers who have an interest in Haskell+GUI development. The issue is that nearly every Windows developer who looks into Haskell+GUI says, This stuff sucks, and walks away, because they're interested in developing applications, not wrestling with GUI toolkits. Yep, that's the one. [snip for brevity] How do you do that in Haskell? Well, you can either install and configure a complete Unix emulator and then compile wxHaskell from source (?!), or you can use Gtk2hs, which still requires you to manually install and configure GTK+ and compile the entire library from source code. And even then, your developed application will only run on Windows boxes that have GTK+ installed (i.e., none of them). All of which is a far cry from install IDE, click some buttons, run the wizzard, job done. Then again, let us not claim that this is only a problem for GUI stuff. If you want to access a database, or run compression algorithms, or play sound, or do absolutely anything else which requires talking to C-land, you've going to have to face a world of pain on Windows. As one of the people trying desperately to make this better on Windows (i.e. as wxHaskell maintainer...), I'd have to add that aspects of GHC make this much harder than I'd like. Take the specific case of wxHaskell, since I'm familiar with it. The 'requirement' is pretty straightforward in principle. What I want is: 1) Make wxHaskell easy to build and install on all platforms. 2) Make wxHaskell work in GHCi for 'exploratory' programming as well as for compiled executables Bear in mind that as I have a (very) demanding day job and a young family, I actually have no more than 3-4 hours a week (at best) to spend maintaining wxHaskell. Bear in mind also that my interest in wxHaskell was always to be able to develop software in Haskell, not fight with linkers and build systems (I get enough of that at work, thanks). While that's my personal problem, and others may not have the same issues, so please feel free to not care at all, it's worth bearing in mind... wxHaskell consists of a set of C bindings over the C++ core of wxWidgets. Broadly speaking, these unmangle the C++ names and do little else. Now, wxWidgets, being C++, links against libstdc++ (a not unreasonable requirement). MinGW, which is the underlying framework used by GHC only knows how to link libstdc++ statically, but the way cabal constructs link commands means that when wxcore gets loaded, GHCi attempts to load libstdc++ dynamically. You're dead. OK. Next step is to build the C wrapping as a separate DLL. In this case libstdc++ can be statically linked with the wxc DLL and the dependency on libstdc++ can go away. Trouble is, you now need to construct a C++ build system for a DLL in Cabal. Lots more custom build hooks, and some of what goes on under the hood is magic. However, eventually you get something which builds a DLL with only mildly sucky dependency management. Problem is now to pick this up in GHC and GHCi. After several weeks I still don't have the right stanza to invoke the linker. Next make sure that this all coexists with the inevitable several instances of MinGW, Cygwin and others which exist on the machine of a typical developer who uses Open Source code - ideally throwing in a nice mix of 32 and 64 bit variants of same, and with completely random path orderings. What would work best for me is something which is, I think, conceptually quite simple: allow Cabal to pull DLLs (or .so or .dylib or wwhatever) from some standard place (maybe in the Cabal tarball for a package), and add them to the link lines correctly, plus put them somewhere GHC will know about them for the future. This means that I, as wxHaskell developer, could build 'known good' wxWidgets DLLs, plus a known good wxc DLL and package them with wxcore, and end users would stop needing to care about building for themselves. This would let me use more appropriate build systems for the non-Haskell components without requiring users to download and install an insane number of libraries and developer tools - IOW, it puts the burden of building libraries on the library maintainer, but takes away the burden on the library maintainer of making this work for everyone else's machines, and documenting it, keeping the build documentation up to date and simple enough for people who don't want to become C or C++ developers to understand! As it is, in order to maintain what is a conceptually simple set of bindings, I need to become a deep expert in: - Customizing Cabal build hooks - How GHC and GHCi construct their link stanzas (is this documented anywhere?) - Installing and using MinGW - since this the only thing GHC guarantees to have available, so I'd like to use it
Re: [Haskell-cafe] I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows.
On 29 Sep 2010, at 20:34, Steve Schafer wrote: This is an attitude that just doesn't fly in the Windows world. Which is unfortunate, because the Windows market is HUGE compared to OS X, and STUNNINGLY HUGE compared to everything else. The fix isn't going to be to find a developer who's willing to do the work to make Haskell+GUI more seamless under Windows. The fix is for the Haskell community--as a whole--to wake up and realize what the wxWidgets folks did a while ago: Hey, you know what? This GUI stuff is _important_ if we want people to pay any attention to the software that we write! This is why, when I developed my theorem prover, I put GUI aspects top of the list I chose wxHaskell because I wanted portability Ironically, given the thrust of this thread, I got it working without too much difficulty on Windows GHC 10.6.4, latest binaries for wxHaskell - easy to install and get working I gather several of my students have successfully done Linux builds of same I switched over recently to Mac OS X (10.6), and (more irony) am having real difficulties getting it to work - installing wxHaskell is a real bear on this platform The GUI theorem prover - see http://www.scss.tcd.ie/Andrew.Butterfield/Saoithin/ (I was going to announce this project to the Haskell Community real soon now, so I guess this is as good a time as any .) -Steve Schafer ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows.
2010/9/30 Andrew Coppin andrewcop...@btinternet.com: And even then, your developed application will only run on Windows boxes that have GTK+ installed (i.e., none of them). You can copy GTK+ DLLs with application. It works very well. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows.
On 30 Sep 2010, at 12:02, Serguey Zefirov wrote: 2010/9/30 Andrew Coppin andrewcop...@btinternet.com: And even then, your developed application will only run on Windows boxes that have GTK+ installed (i.e., none of them). You can copy GTK+ DLLs with application. Works fine with wxHaskell as well It works very well. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows.
Hi, I would like to see that we add gtk2hs and/or wxHaskell to the Haskell Platform. That would improve the situation! I used gtk2hs and found it usable to build a cross platform GUI App. On Windows you need an installer, which includes the gtk library part. There are some (on Windows quite popular) programs like Pidgin, which are gtk based. Jürgen Nicklisch-Franken caseyh wrote: I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows. For Haskell GUI's is Ubuntu easier to setup. If so, we're losing people if Haskell GUI's are so hard to get working under Windows. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/I-still-cannot-seem-to-get-a-GUI-working-under-Windows.-tp29839513p29846499.html Sent from the Haskell - Haskell-Cafe mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows.
On 30/09/2010, at 7:08 AM, Christopher Done wrote: On 29 September 2010 17:01, cas...@istar.ca wrote: I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows. For Haskell GUI's is Ubuntu easier to setup. If so, we're losing people if Haskell GUI's are so hard to get working under Windows. We're losing people! Charge! I think the problem is lack of Windows developers interested in GUIs, and that Windows is not so POSIXy-development-friendly as Linux or OS X. But mostly lack of people interested in that area, I think. I think we should put this in perspective. I teach a full-year 300-level software engineering paper. This year the students were required to design a project of their own and start to build it in Windows using C or C++. Then we switched them to Linux -- it's an education, not a picnic! For the final deliverable, they had to provide something I could run on one of the department's Macs running Linux. Welcome to DLL Hell. Of course I made a good faith attempt to try to install the libraries that they provided (if they did) but without superuser access there are limits; I also made a good faith attempt to download and build libraries they did not provide, but my patience has its limits and I wasn't prepared to spend more than an hour per assignment doing this. And of course there's the 64-bit -vs- 32-bit thing, where 32-bit programs are *supposed* to run on 64-bit Linux, but some of the 32-bit libraries required to make this actually work are missing... Unless you are willing to work at the level of Xt or possibly Lesstif, portability of GUI software on Linux in C or C++ does not come automatically; you have to work at it. Don't get me started on everyone has the same kind of screen I do... ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
[Haskell-cafe] I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows.
I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows. For Haskell GUI's is Ubuntu easier to setup. If so, we're losing people if Haskell GUI's are so hard to get working under Windows. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows.
There are issues, yes, and you may need the MinGW tool chain to get the GUI packages to build and install properly, but it does work. I have blogged about some of my experiences, both good and bad, at http://jpmoresmau.blogspot.com/. What GUI tool specifically do you want to use? JP On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 5:01 PM, cas...@istar.ca wrote: I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows. For Haskell GUI's is Ubuntu easier to setup. If so, we're losing people if Haskell GUI's are so hard to get working under Windows. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe -- JP Moresmau http://jpmoresmau.blogspot.com/ ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows.
On 29 September 2010 17:01, cas...@istar.ca wrote: I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows. For Haskell GUI's is Ubuntu easier to setup. If so, we're losing people if Haskell GUI's are so hard to get working under Windows. We're losing people! Charge! I think the problem is lack of Windows developers interested in GUIs, and that Windows is not so POSIXy-development-friendly as Linux or OS X. But mostly lack of people interested in that area, I think. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows.
On Wed, 29 Sep 2010 20:08:07 +0200, you wrote: I think the problem is lack of Windows developers interested in GUIs, and that Windows is not so POSIXy-development-friendly as Linux or OS X. But mostly lack of people interested in that area, I think. There are lots of Windows developers interested in GUIs. On the whole, I'd say that Windows developers are far more focused on GUIs than non-Windows developers. (See, for example: http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/free-software-usability and http://daringfireball.net/2004/04/spray_on_usability for some discussion of attitudes.) The issue isn't that there aren't a lot of Windows developers who have an interest in Haskell+GUI development. The issue is that nearly every Windows developer who looks into Haskell+GUI says, This stuff sucks, and walks away, because they're interested in developing applications, not wrestling with GUI toolkits. -Steve Schafer ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows.
I imagine that getting Haskell GUI libraries set and playing nice with the native GTK libs is a pain on Windows. That said, I know that Haskell has very nice Lua bindings and Lua has pretty mature GTK bindings. Has anyone tried developing their UI in Lua with Haskell doing all the heavy lifting? -deech On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 1:33 PM, Steve Schafer st...@fenestra.com wrote: On Wed, 29 Sep 2010 20:08:07 +0200, you wrote: I think the problem is lack of Windows developers interested in GUIs, and that Windows is not so POSIXy-development-friendly as Linux or OS X. But mostly lack of people interested in that area, I think. There are lots of Windows developers interested in GUIs. On the whole, I'd say that Windows developers are far more focused on GUIs than non-Windows developers. (See, for example: http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/free-software-usability and http://daringfireball.net/2004/04/spray_on_usability for some discussion of attitudes.) The issue isn't that there aren't a lot of Windows developers who have an interest in Haskell+GUI development. The issue is that nearly every Windows developer who looks into Haskell+GUI says, This stuff sucks, and walks away, because they're interested in developing applications, not wrestling with GUI toolkits. -Steve Schafer ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows.
On 29 September 2010 20:33, Steve Schafer st...@fenestra.com wrote: There are lots of Windows developers interested in GUIs. [..] The issue isn't that there aren't a lot of Windows developers who have an interest in Haskell+GUI development. Yeah, what do you think I meant? We're talking about the state of Haskell GUI libraries, naturally I'm talking about Haskell GUI developers. Of course Windows developers are obsessed with GUIs, I can't get anything done in a terminal on Windows. (I'm exaggerating.) The issue is that nearly every Windows developer who looks into Haskell+GUI says, This stuff sucks, and walks away, because they're interested in developing applications, not wrestling with GUI toolkits. Yeah, but not liking wrestling with libraries isn't peculiar to Haskell developers. There just needs to be enough people that the probability of there being a person who will bother to wrestle with it is high enough. Hence, the issue is lack of interest. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows.
On Wed, 29 Sep 2010 20:44:22 +0200, you wrote: Yeah, but not liking wrestling with libraries isn't peculiar to Haskell developers. There just needs to be enough people that the probability of there being a person who will bother to wrestle with it is high enough. Hence, the issue is lack of interest. No, it isn't peculiar to Haskell developers; the problem is the one that is discussed in more detail in the two references I gave in my previous message: For the most part, developers who are attracted to open-source projects (and this certainly includes the majority of Haskell developers) simply don't think much of GUIs, and are consequently willing to release software with half-baked GUI support (at best). This is an attitude that just doesn't fly in the Windows world. Which is unfortunate, because the Windows market is HUGE compared to OS X, and STUNNINGLY HUGE compared to everything else. The fix isn't going to be to find a developer who's willing to do the work to make Haskell+GUI more seamless under Windows. The fix is for the Haskell community--as a whole--to wake up and realize what the wxWidgets folks did a while ago: Hey, you know what? This GUI stuff is _important_ if we want people to pay any attention to the software that we write! -Steve Schafer ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows.
On 29/09/2010 07:33 PM, Steve Schafer wrote: The issue isn't that there aren't a lot of Windows developers who have an interest in Haskell+GUI development. The issue is that nearly every Windows developer who looks into Haskell+GUI says, This stuff sucks, and walks away, because they're interested in developing applications, not wrestling with GUI toolkits. Yep, that's the one. If you want to build a GUI application in Tcl, it's going to take a couple of minutes to throw together some Tk commands and you're done. In Java, you'll have to write a mile of boilerplate, but there are wizzy tools that will write it for you. And I gather that if you've coding in C or C++ or C#, you can use VisualStudio to throw a complex GUI together in a couple of minutes. How do you do that in Haskell? Well, you can either install and configure a complete Unix emulator and then compile wxHaskell from source (?!), or you can use Gtk2hs, which still requires you to manually install and configure GTK+ and compile the entire library from source code. And even then, your developed application will only run on Windows boxes that have GTK+ installed (i.e., none of them). All of which is a far cry from install IDE, click some buttons, run the wizzard, job done. Then again, let us not claim that this is only a problem for GUI stuff. If you want to access a database, or run compression algorithms, or play sound, or do absolutely anything else which requires talking to C-land, you've going to have to face a world of pain on Windows. It seems that because this stuff is such a PITA on Windows, nobody uses Haskell on Windows. And since nobody uses Haskell on Windows, nobody is fixing these problems. So they just stay here, forever. So anyway, that's the problem. The solution is... ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows.
On Wednesday 29 September 2010 23:02:02, Andrew Coppin wrote: So anyway, that's the problem. The solution is... Two obvious solutions. - stop using Windows and migrate to an OS where stuff works pretty much out of the box (not going to happen a lot) - start helping to make things work on Windows (maybe someday that will happen) ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
RE: [Haskell-cafe] I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows.
These were enough to get me started: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Opengl http://haskell.forkio.com/com-examples http://darcs.haskell.org/packages/Win32/examples/ Roderick Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 11:01:50 -0400 From: cas...@istar.ca To: haskell-cafe@haskell.org Subject: [Haskell-cafe] I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows. I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows. For Haskell GUI's is Ubuntu easier to setup. If so, we're losing people if Haskell GUI's are so hard to get working under Windows. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
