On Fri, 12 Dec 2014, [email protected] wrote:
<offtopic>IMHO, Web GUI is a fad. HTML was not intended for GUI, and this
poor creature continues to be, not quite fit for what it is used, a pile of
amendments without much thought. It surely has its advantages, network
capability and no installation, but the main one is popularity or
hype.</offtopic>
I don't think it is totally off-topic. ML/SML started out in the
interactive theorem proving community (as the "meta-language" of the LCF
prover). The question behind the GUI is how to connect ML (and thus the
proof assistant) to the outside world: both end-users and other systems.
I've found my own answers for that with the PIDE framework, which is a
bi-ped with Scala and ML. Thus the connectivity happens on the JVM world,
using whatever is there. For Isabelle/PIDE/jEdit I use the AWT/Swing GUI
framework, which sort of works out, although it is not ideal. It is
difficult to find fundamentally better GUI frameworks, though, and the
main requirement is a proper editor on top of the GUI framework. The
resulting system of Isabelle/jEdit is then a traditional (old-fashioned!)
rich-client IDE application.
HTML (4 or 5) + X connectivity has always been there as an alternative.
Some people have investigated that to some extent and with some success:
both for Scala and Poly/ML, e.g. Isabelle/CLIDE from the Bremen guys.
After so many years pondering local GUI vs. remote HTTP / local HTML
front-ends, my impression is that neither is a really good solution.
Something fundamental needs to change in computing technology to get
really good solutions. We have to make the best out of the things we see
today, and extrapolate to a better future.
Back to the original question: a public version of the aforementioned GTK
C bindings for Poly/ML would be great. Although GTK is just one of the
many legacy GUI frameworks in use. Qt4 might do a better job, but I can't
say anything myself, apart from pointing to some core Linux guys (Dirk
Hohndel and Linus Torvalds) who moved from GTK to Qt4 recently, see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0
Makarius
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