[ruby-talk:01679] Re: New Ruby projects

((comp.lang.misc + cc: ruby-talk ML))

Clemens Hintze <[e-mail]> wrote in message
news:[e-mail]...
> 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!

Well, if you spelled out in gory detail how the Tcl/Tk stuff works, it would
look pretty bad too, although in a different sort of way. But apparently it
works OK, although not for me so far.


And despite the internal details, the Pythons seem to have been very pleased
with the results of using wxWindows, both from a performance perspective and
from an OO perspective.

> 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.

FLTK looks very interesting, but it unfortunately doesn't seem to have as
strong and broad a group of developers as wxWindows, nor nearly as many
users, nor the same level of documentation. (These are just my general
impressions at present, I haven't studies any of these things in great
detail.)

Looking over the GUI evaluations/debates by the Pythons, the strongest
proponents seem to generally favor wxWindows, and they further claim that
the wxWindows people are quite favorably inclined toward Python and are
quite helpful. This is an issue that they have been delving into pretty
seriously for quite a while. I think it would probably be unwise to not
follow their lead in this on one hand, and it would be good to leverage off
of their experience on the other. (And later on we can get them to convert
to Ruby. :-)

Conrad