From: Ian Main <imain@...>
Date: 2000-03-04T00:02:08-08:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:01712] Re: New Ruby projects

I just want to say one quick thing on this subject.. you'll notice that you
can get tcl and tk in different packages (IIRC), and I hope that ruby stays
the same.  I really don't want to be forced to build a gui env. just to use
the ruby language.

Otherwise, what the "defacto ruby toolkit" becomes.. who knows

Ian


On Thu, Mar 02, 2000 at 03:25:29AM -0600, Conrad Schneiker wrote:
> ((comp.lang.misc + cc: ruby-talk ML))
> 
> Clemens Hintze <clemens.hintze@alcatel.de> wrote in message
> news:lkputfypum.fsf@alcatel.de...
> > Conrad Schneiker writes:
> > > ((comp.lang.misc + cc: ruby-lang ML))
> > >
> > > From: Guy N. Hurst <gnhurst@hurstlinks.com>
> > ...
> > > 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
> 
> 
>