[ruby-talk:7552] Re: GTK+ on Windows

Richard Schulman writes,

# I haven't used GTK+ myself, but I am concerned by comments
# that its port to the Windows environment is "mediocre." See,
# for example, the otherwise enthusiastic Sun World article at
# 
# http://www.sunworld.com/sunworldonline/swol-11-2000/swol-1110-gtk.html
# 
# If Ruby doesn't provide an attractive GUI environment for
# Windows developers, a very large community of developers
# will have been written off.

Yes, that would be intolerable. However, I think the Gimp on Windows is 
(or at least looks) pretty attractive, although I haven't used it much 
(and I certainly haven't studied Gimp's internals, so I don't know how 
attractive they are with respect to GTK+ usage). What do others think?

The only negative thing I've previously seen is a gripe about the GTK+ 
file selector. This IIRC was in a Mozilla newsgroup, where IIRC someone 
was getting flack for planning to implent their own version of a file 
selector rather than making and contributing the change directly to GTK+ 
itself. 

Here is what the above-cited article says with reference to "mediocre":

# But perhaps the most frequent complaint about GTK+ is its mediocre
# support of Win32. While GTK+ 2.0 includes a framework that addresses
# this problem, GTK+'s Windows support hasn't ripened like Qt's and
# Tk's.

Well, I don't really have any good idea what that means. However it seems 
to also indicate that such problems, whatever they are, will soon go away. 
I don't have any idea what fraction of (actual, potential) GTK+ users make 
such complaints, nor what they mean by "mediocre support" (e.g. printing 
support, pure windows look and feel, or what?) And I don't have any idea 
if these opinions are to any extent offset by countervailing satisfied 
users who would disagree.

So maybe the best thing to do is to cc: the authors, Cameron Laird and 
Kathryn Soraiz, and see if one of them might be willing and able to 
elaborate a bit for us. (If so, the bigger context of this discussion is, 
what should be the successor to Tk as the next major (Linux/Unix/Win/Mac) 
Ruby-standard GUI, in case you would like to comment on that issue as 
well. Thanks in advance.)

Conrad Schneiker
(This note is unofficial and subject to improvement without notice.)