Re: Octave on Reddit

[John Swensen]

On Sep 29, 2010, at 11:11 AM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:

> 
> Or perhaps John Swensen can explain more fully why he prefers GTK+ to
> Qt, perhaps my concerns are unfounded and GTK+ is a perfectly good
> toolkit with which to attract users. Or perhaps attracting users isn't
> the actual goal at all.
> 

I have no real affinity for either toolkit.  I have worked a bit with QT 
(pre-QT4) and much more with GTK+ (and in particular the C++ bindings called 
GTKMM). After my initial attempt at wrapping Octave in both GTK and QT around 
2004, the one and only reason I started using GTK+ was the availability of a 
complete terminal emulator widget that depended only on GTK+ and not Gnome.  At 
the time, there was no terminal emulator widget for QT or KDE.  Now, there is 
the ability to embed Konsole into a KDE application using their KParts 
interface, but has the following drawbacks: (1) you need all of KDE (or at 
least significant portions of it) and (2) interfacing with things embedded 
through KParts can be a quite a hassle. Making a fully functional terminal 
emulator is very much a non-trivial task and not something I wanted (or want) 
to tackle.  I also didn't think it was reasonable to try to completely 
re-implement all the functionality that the Octave command line already 
provides.

QT4 on the other hand has some niceties:
- a better dockable widgets technique than the solution I have using libgdl for 
GTK+
- OpenGL widgets were part of the design and not an afterthought (as it had 
been for GTK+ until recently)
- others???

The other option that I never really investigated was using Java.  Maybe 
someone with more Java experience could comment on the availability of complete 
terminal emulator widget in Java that work on Linux/Windows/OSX.

I wouldn't say that support for GTK+ is lacking on Windows and OSX (both 
Inkscape and Gimp are very complicated projects built against GTK+ for both 
these platforms and work quite well).  What I would say is that many of the 
libraries that depend on GTK+ still have issues on Windows and OSX.  Now maybe 
some of these issues can be traced back to GTK+ itself, but I don't know enough 
to say. User interface toolkits are complicated and convoluted things, so I 
would expect that regardless of the toolkit chosen you will always run into 
hiccups of some sort.

I guess my comments haven't really given any direction, but hopefully 
elucidates the state of things. At least for the near future, I will probably 
continue with GTK+ as it is the path of least resistance (for me) and OctaveDE 
is reasonably complete (the SVN repository now has fixes to allow debugging 
from the editor).  Hope this helps in some sense.

John Swensen