From: Michael Mueller <muellerix@...>
Date: 2003-03-19T19:13:52+09:00
Subject: Re: Thoughts about native Ruby widget set

Idan Sofer wrote:

> However, I feel there is a lack of native, pure ruby widget set - this way
> ruby could have gui support in it's core distribution, no need for
> external depencies.
> 
> Although non-trivial ,in theory this task is possible, for Unix pure ruby
> X11 library available, and for win32 there is the win32api(an abstraction
> layer could be used here, with the widget set built on top, like Gtk/Gdk)

Yes it's probably possible, but it would probably have the same problems as 
Java's SWING, for which took a couple of years to get rid of some major 
perfomance problems.... and since ruby won't be any faster than Java, the 
problems might even get worse!
That's why eclipse (The IDE) has been built on top of a native GUI-Library.
I think the existing libraries are sufficiently platform independent and 
performant. Although the Library you are wanting to make sounds like a 
great idea there's imho no real need for them (at least from my pragmatic 
point of view).

Michael