[ruby-talk:7879] Re: GUIs for Rubies

"Conrad Schneiker" <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>Ben Tilly writes,
>
># Perl's lack of stable threading makes it unsuitable for all but the
># simplest GUI applications.
>
>Very interesting. (And yet another item for the language comparison pages,
>at least until Perl 6 possibly materializes a couple of years from now.)

For more thoughts on this see:

http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=29620

The link to http://www.bitmover.com/talks/cliq/slide01.html
is about an apparently unrelated problem, but it is in fact
very applicable.  Given two equally well-written and tuned
programs that solve the same problem, the heavily threaded
one is ikely to have more bugs and worse throughput than the
non-threaded one.  An up front division of labour into
essentially independent parts is a parallelism model which
is easier to get right and which scales better.  But a more
integrated threaded application is likely to have better
interactivity.

I still need to read up on Ruby's threading model, but that
comment is pretty generic.  Threading comes with a lot of
costs that people tend to ignore until it is too late.  But
people tend to judge overall performance of GUIs by how
responsive it is, so for interesting GUIs, multi-threading is
usually the right choice.

># Tk is a good fit for very simple applications.
>
>That was certainly my experience with Perl/Tk some years ago.

Exactly.  Perl/Tk came out and was sufficient to the main
need.  If you want to write GUI wrappers, you will hit
problems with Perl before Tk, and hence there is little
need in the Perl community for anything more sophisticated
in the way of GUI toolkits than Tk.

>However, in anticipation of a "Which Ruby/GUI should I use?" FAQ entry
>(which I currently guess will very likely at least include Tk, FOX, and
>GTK+ 2.0 by this time next year), do you happen to know off-hand what are
>regarded as the most serious Tk drawbacks for non-simple applications, in
>addition to not having as many (built-in, out of the box) widgets as most
>people nowadays seem to want and expect?

No.  Truth be told, I don't enjoy working in GUI environments
or on GUIs, so I don't pay much attention to the finer details
of their needs.  But I want to be able to pick the right tool
for the job, so I try to learn the limits of the tools I am
using to give me insight on when I need to go about getting
more appropriate ones.

Cheers,
Ben
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