From: avdi@...
Date: 2001-08-16T04:14:17+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:19825] Re: Ruby GUI

Quoting Eli Green <eli.green@codedogs.ca>:
> FOX does not support the Mac. GTK barely supports Windows. wxWindows is
> enormous. I don't know what it's like now, but the .dll alone was pretty
> huge
> on its own. Also, it's in C++, and it often wraps C++ libraries. So lean
> little spry ruby ends up with the bloat of 2 C++ libraries behind it
> (wxWindows+MFC or wxWindows+Qt, etc.)

According to their website, the Windows port is now implemented in pure Windows 
API calls - no MFC, no Qt.  And on the *NIX side it would be wxWindows over 
either Gtk or Motif.  Dunno about the Mac side.  So at least on Win and *NIX it 
would be C++-over-C-libraries.

Seems like one gets to pick either slimness or cross-platform support, but not 
both.  I understand the ports of Tk to other languages besides TCL generally 
involve having a full TCL interpreter running alongside whichever language is 
running the show. Which is bound to introduce a fair amount of both CPU and 
memory overhead.  None of the "fast, light" toolkits (including the Fast Light 
ToolKit (FLTK) itself) have the breadth of platform support that the heftier 
ones have.

This seems like another good argument for having another abstraction layer 
between Ruby and the actual toolkit used - a more nimble toolkit could be used 
on platforms which support it; and a fat&slow "catch-all" toolkit could be used 
on the platforms that don't.  Admittedly I probably just glossed over a 
enourmously difficult piece of abstraction coding ;-)

~Avdi