Re: [Chicken-users] Installing chicken on windows

[Vasilij Schneidermann]

Hello folks,

I haven't posted to this list before as I'm more of an IRC person, but
have been notified that I might want to engage this time ;)

> Oh, as an aside, it would be fantastic to have IUP be just as easy to
> install on Linux/Unix. Sadly this is not the case. I have not surveyed
> the GUI toolkit world recently. Is there a better alternative
> available for Chicken now?

I happen to be currently writing my thesis on CHICKEN or more
specifically, GUI programming approaches, the current state of GUI
programming with CHICKEN and the evaluation of interesting looking
libraries to write eggs for.  In the course of this, I wrote and
published three eggs, kiwi[1], nuklear[2] and libui[3].

libui is the closest thing to IUP.  It supports Windows (Win32), OS X
(Cocoa) and Linux/Unix (GTK) desktops, provided they're up-to-date.
Unlike IUP, it's relatively simple to build as it only requires CMake as
prerequisite.  My issues with it so far are that it's still an immature
project and that the API isn't perfect, but that shouldn't be as
noticable with the egg.

As I'm a Linux user, I haven't tested whether any of the eggs could be
made to work with Windows or OS X.  While I'm fairly sure that I could
get a Windows VM going, I'm unfamiliar with the process of using tools
originating from the Linux world as there appear to be several
incompatible ways of doing this and CHICKEN itself is no exception.  I
have no idea about the state of OS X virtualization and getting a Mac
Mini for this purpose doesn't exactly sound attractive...

Any help from more knowledgeable people on this topic is appreciated!

Cheers
Vasilij

[1]: http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/kiwi
[2]: http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/nuklear
[3]: http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/libui