Hi everybody, I've recently been thinking about ways we would make the wxhaskell installation process less painful.
My desire is for the "cabal install" part of the process to be completely painless. Right now, the wxcore process is slow, complicated and doesn't work for the user package database (which means you can't just cabal install any old program that uses wxhaskell). What I hope we can do is to segregate all the slow and painful stuff into C land (using standard stuff like autotools), keeping the Haskell-y bits nice and smooth. I think this will reduce the net pain because then people can just think in terms of (1) installing all the backend stuff like wxWidgets and (2) cabal install. A second desire would be for us to get rid of our wxc code altogether and move it to its own project? WXC is shared by wxHaskell, wxOcaml and wxEiffel, but we all have our own variants of the code. There was a wxc project, but it seems to have gone dead. I've remarked on #wxwidgets that it would be great if the wxWidgets team to take over the WXC project so that it would be more actively maintained. This is where Kevin Ollivier of wxWidgets pointed out something interesting: in the current wxWidgets trunk, it should be possible to automatically generate the C bindings from the Doxygen XML output. In fact, he has already done something similar for Python, metadata to Python objects: http://trac.wxwidgets.org/browser/wxWidgets/trunk/docs/doxygen/doxymlparser.py This makes me wonder: can we do something similar for wxHaskell or wxc? What if wxc was generated in the same fashion? Instead of having this be some whole other project, why not make it ridiculously easy for the wxWidgets team to just ship a C interface around wxWidgets? I'm vaguely aware that our copy of wxc has some information which helps us keep track of the wxWidgets class hierarchy. Presumably the same information could be autogenerated as well? This sort of thing has been suggested before (people have mentioned SWIG). Now that wxHaskell 0.11 has been released with wxWidgets 2.8 support, is it time to take this back-end stuff more seriously? It sounds like what one of us could do is hack up a quick XSLT sheet or something similar to produce the C bindings. Maybe a HaXml program as a prototype? What should we do next? Thanks! -- Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow> PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9
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