[mercury-users] GUI Toolkits and Mercury

[Jonathan Morgan]

Julien Fischer wrote:

> On Tue, 22 Nov 2005, Jonathan Morgan wrote:
>
> > What is the state of GUI toolkits under Mercury?  In the extras
distribution
> > there is an X binding (not really portable to Win32/Mac OS X),
>
> It certainly works on Mac OS X, assuming you have X installed on your
> machine.

Would most people?

> > a binding to
> > OpenGL and GLUT and a binding to Tcl/Tk.  This last one is probably the
only
> > widget-style set here that is cross-platform and commonly used.
> >
> > All these seem to be for C backends only.  What would be used for
IL/Java?
> > Would you use C#/Winforms or Java/Swing?
>
> Most probably.

So you would not intend to move .NET based Mercury code to non .NET
backends?  This would seem to militate against the portability provided, at
least in theory, by Mercury.

> > In terms of features, power, and native support for various platforms
> > wxWidgets would probably be best for Win32 and Mac OS X, while Gtk+
would be
> > best for X (wx binds to Gtk+, but I'm told that native Gtk applications
> > generally look better).
>
> We were considering a binding to wxWidgets.  Indeed we even offered it as
an
> honours project this year but there were no takers amongst the students.
As
> you point out below, the major disadvantage of wxWidgets is the necessity
of
> writing Mercury-C-C++ "glue" code to join all the bits up.  In practice it
> would probably be possible to extend the foreign language interface to
> generate a lot of the glue code automatically so it wouldn't be that bad.

Wasn't the honours project for developing a more declarative GUI?

> I spent some time looking at Gtk a year or so ago, from memory it has a
number
> of features that make writing a Mercury binding for it quite awkward.

Which ones?  Gtk has about the largest number of bindings of any library,
including ones to declarative languages like Haskell and Erlang.  Could they
all be wrong, or are they problems unique to Mercury?

Jon

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