[ruby-talk:01659] Re: New Ruby projects

Conrad Schneiker writes:
> ((comp.lang.misc + cc: ruby-lang ML))
> 
> From: Guy N. Hurst <[e-mail]>

...

> What do others think about making wxWindows the default (not
> exclusive, just default) cross-platform Ruby GUI and including
> Ruby/wxWindows as part of the standard Ruby distribution?

Nononono!!! Please not!

Let me explain. wxWindows is *not* a pure toolkit at all. It resembles
a class framework like e.g. MFC do. Itself it relies on underlaying
toolkit to do its task. Under Windows it seems to use the Native
window widgets. Under X11 it use the Gimp toolkit (GTK).

wxWindows is written in C++. We cannot direcly use C++ for Ruby
extensions. We have to write C wrappers around every C++ method! So
what we will get are Ruby classes written in C wrapping C++ methods of
wxWindows, that itself are wrapping e.g. GTK under X11 (BTW: which is
written in C itself) to do the X11 calls for displaying widgets. That
sounds silly for me! And very complicate too!

I do not say, that we should not have such beast, but *please* not as
default GUI!

If there is such a default GUI, I would propose FLTK. Although it is
also written in C++, but it does not itself wrap another toolkit! It
relies on the native primitives of X11, Windows or Mac. It is damned
fast and easy to use. Its memory footprint is very small and it is
*very* powerful! Furthermore it comes with a GUI builder too. It
should not be too difficult to write a parser that is able to read the
GUI builder's file format to use it to build the GUI for Ruby
dynamically (somewhat like Glade/Ruby by Yashi.

Takaaki Tateishi <[e-mail]> has already begun to wrap FLTK
for Ruby. Perhaps somebody could help him. I would do, but I have not
any time currently :-(

> (Incidentally, another design consideration for the Ruby/wxWindows
> module is to anticipate the possibility of really good
> cross-platform availability/support of GTK some 2 or 4 or 6 years
> from now, in which case we would want to make it as easy as possible
> to make GTK the new default Ruby GUI, while preserving the wxWindows
> interface with the wxWindows/GTK binding.)

FLTK is more cross platform than wxWindows, AFAIK. And it is much
leaner and faster than that (e.g. the GUI builder, statically linked
without debug information, stripped, with *all* widgets build-in
836976KB under Solaris 7).

Just my 0.02$

> 
> Conrad

\cle

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