From: Conrad Schneiker <schneiker@...>
Date: 2000-07-23T13:32:54-05:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:04180] Re: Partly converted English Ruby/Tk widget demo working.

Hi,

"Dave Thomas" writes,

> Conrad Schneiker <schneik@austin.ibm.com> writes:
>
> > One curious thing that I noticed is that the individual widget demos run
> > by the Ruby/Tk widget program start up noticeably slower on the AIX
> > machine than on the NT machine, even though the AIX machine is much
> > faster. Moreover, Ruby/Tk doesn't seem to be using more than a small
> > fraction of the available CPU time of the AIX machine. Any idea of what
> > it might be doing?
>
> Is it possible you have a problem with that machine's resolve.conf,
> our with the DISPLAY environment variable, that was causing GTK to do
> a DNS call to find the display before starting?

I'm not sure, but it never occurred to me to check because everything in the
Tcl/Tk widget demo ran blazingly fast on the same machine, and remote gvim
(the long-awaited 2nd one true editor :-) windows start instantly.

Side note: I'm working with Tk here, not GTK.

However, maybe I should poll people about Tk versus GTK. My reason for
picking Tk for try-it ({Transcoding, telematic, and tutorial} Ruby Yielding
{Interactive, Innovation, Integration} Toolkit) [3x for try, try, and try-it
again :-)] and the preliminary work leading up to it are as follows:

1. I want try-it to be easily usable ("out of the box" to the maximum extent
possible) by Ruby novices and by would-be Ruby users who aren't expert at
messing with tarballs and building stuff from scratch.

2. In addition to working on AIX and Linux, I want try-it to be easily
usable on Windows/whatever (where I expect the biggest pool of potential new
Ruby users exists, and for whom Ruby can help provide a future portability
bridge to AIX and Linux).

3. While I think GTK and Glade are fantastic, using them and what they
produce requires getting an XML processing program, plus getting XML and GTK
modules, plus one or two other pieces I don't recall at the moment. I don't
know how well all this stuff works together on Windows/whatever, and no one
that I know of is yet providing all this stuff in a binary distribution that
all works together for that platform.

4. If I knew that the GTK and XML stuff was soon going to be part of the
standard Ruby distribution as Tk currently is (which I would _REALLY_ prefer
to use, and would really like to see!), then I would consider the advantages
of using GTK over Tk to be worth the extra work required to somehow make
getting and installing the extra related pieces easier for novices to
accomplish.

So what do others think about Tk versus GTK?

============================================

I also have another question, presuming that I stick with Tk for the time
being. After I finish up the Kanji to English changes for the Ruby/Tk widget
demo, as the next step leading up to try-it, I was thinking of making a
Ruby-generating version of ancient and abandoned SpecTcl Tk GUI-based GUI
builder (like the Perl-generating SpecPerl version), and possibly even
rewriting SpecRuby itself in Ruby/Tk. Is there anyone out there that has
much knowledge/experience in converting Tcl to Ruby?

Conrad