[ruby-talk:8436] Re: Praise for Ruby/GTK

In article <[e-mail]>,
Conrad Schneiker <[e-mail]> wrote:
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>However, there is another interesting angle on these problems/issues. Here 
>are some interesting links on Python *megawidgets*:
>
>(http://www.dscpl.com.au/pmw/doc/index.html)
>
>    Pmw 0.8.4 Python megawidgets  
>
>    Pmw is a toolkit for building high-level compound widgets in Python
>    using the Tkinter module. 
One of the striking facts about Perl/Tk and
Tkinter is how far they go beyond simply
binding Tk to Perl and Python.  Both substan-
tially augment the base Tk widget set in
quite interesting ways.  I suspect there's a
deep conclusion to draw from this, although
I don't yet know what it is.
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>If we had a good Ruby/Tk megawidgets collection as a standard part of 
>Ruby/Tk, people might be more favorably inclined towards Ruby/Tk.
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>Does anyone know if there is some *reasonable* way to hook up Ruby to Tk 
>without going through Tcl? Does anyone know if any recent Tk work will 
Presumably you categorize the Perl/Tk approach
as unreasonable.
>affect this one way or the other? And does anyone have any idea of what 
I'm asking around.  I believe the answer is this:
it never mattered to the Tk maintainers before.
They still know little of what Perl, Ruby, ...
need to simplify the chore.  However, as I wrote
earlier in this thread, the Tk development crew
is now VERY open to changes that improve the
bindings for other languages.  So:  no, there's
no recent Tk work that will affect this parti-
cularly; however, all it'll take is a strong
voice from the Ruby, Perl, Python, ... camps to 
start change happening.
>the relative performance gain of going around Tcl might be?
Yes, there are people with an "idea of what the
relative performance gain of going around Tcl might
be".  A first approximation is the speed-up from
Tkinter to Perl/Tk, which is generally in the
range of two to ten.  Experienced pythoneers
probably have a more precise notion, because there
once was a "tight" binding of Python and Tk, before
Tkinter won out.

Tk isn't at the end of its performance life, by
the way; there are plenty of ideas afloat in the
world for improving it.  My impression is that
some of these are likely to be easier to implement
than the cost of changing toolkits.
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-- 

Cameron Laird <[e-mail]>
Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal:  http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/home.html