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Re: [Chicken-users] cross-platform gui toolkit


From: Brandon J. Van Every
Subject: Re: [Chicken-users] cross-platform gui toolkit
Date: Mon, 05 Feb 2007 01:30:29 -0800
User-agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.9 (Windows/20061207)

felix winkelmann wrote:

If I had a simple, GUI toolkit running on Linux, OS X and Windows, binds
native widgets,

Why native widgets? What's important about that? As a game developer, this fetish has been very difficult for me to relate to. Games all want to distinguish how they look, not look like the same game. I can understand having menus with roughly the same stuff in roughly the same places on every OS. But people have been doing that for quite a number of years now, it's not an aesthetic problem.

In fact, what I've typically wanted out of the big bloated GUI toolkits, and where at last count they all failed, is I wanted my widgets skinnable. Or even shapeable. But accountants don't need that sort of thing, so even at the OS level, the support for it wasn't so good. Granted I wanted things to run on Windows 2000 and that's getting long in the tooth to worry about anymore. But I'm still using Windows 2000. Microsoft has added zero value since then, so why move on?

has a simple basic graphics API (OpenGL would be ideal),

I fear for OpenGL on Windows.


is smaller than 1-2 MB,
provides text-editing (multiline), buttons, images, frames, checkboxes,
and a couple more widgets, simple menus, then I'd be happy.
FLTK could be the one, but is a bit flaky

And there's actually something rock solid out there? Chicken doesn't even have automated nightly builds or testing suites. "It has bugs" especially is not a valid excuse in open source. You can contribute bugfixes and feature improvements to other communities. It's a lot more sane than NIH.

There are reasons to decline other people's software though. When I look at OpenGL windowing toolkits, I decline the ones written in C++, and the ones that don't have active communities. There's just no value in 1..3 guys barely getting anything done, almost never making releases, and having a mailing list where crickets chirp. CPW and GLFW both have poachable C starter code, but that's about all. I'm not going to go try to save their communities. The leadership and energy simply isn't there. We're better off building a community from scratch here.

In contrast, WxWidgets, Gtk+, and Qt all have vast communities, far outstripping the size of our little Chicken enclave. We're small time, small potatoes, and pretty immature compared to them. It would be great to tap into their resources. Unfortunately, they may be ossified in their political goals. I wouldn't bank on "smaller is better" getting much play in those circles.

FLTK could be have the right focus on size. But it is written in the wrong language, C++. You could work on Chicken's C++ capabilities, using FLTK as the test target.

and why should a Linux user
that has Gtk installed hunt down the proper FLTK version?

Why should they bother to install Chicken or CMake? It's a lazy argument for lazy people.



I simply don't believe that there is the perect one. There is no
perfect software.

That doesn't imply that everything should be your own software.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every





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