[ruby-talk:8538] Re: Praise for Ruby/GTK

Cameron Laird wrote:

# Conrad Schneiker <[e-mail]> wrote:
# 
# >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.

Hmm, that's not quit what I intended. I should have said "reasonably 
easy". AFAIK from tangential comments, Perl/Tk took an enormous about of 
work and was beset by endless delays. If so, I have no hope that that sort 
of effort would be repeated on behalf of Ruby/Tk.

# >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.

That probably wont be me (since I'm not planning on using Tk, although I 
would certainly like to see it remain viable). However, if others want to 
speak up (especially if you have Tk allies in the Perl and Python worlds), 
it sounds like now is the time to do it.

# >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. 

Enough to be noticable. I'd be surprised if Ruby/Tk were not in the same 
ballpark as Tkinter. Good to know it's not imagination.

# Experienced pythoneers
# probably have a more precise notion, because there
# once was a "tight" binding of Python and Tk, before
# Tkinter won out.

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