Message-ID: <44D37FCD.1020107 at gushee.net>
Date: Fri, 04 Aug 2006 11:11:41 -0600
From: Matt Gushee <matt at gushee.net>
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To: lablgtk at math.nagoya-u.ac.jp
Subject: Re: Rendering an image on a canvas?
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Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:

>   - not many people program in Ocmal
>   - of those who do, not many do gui programing with lablgtk*

... which I suppose means that not many do gui programming at all--since 
LablTk and LablGTK are really the only production-quality GUI toolkits 
for OCaml. And--I didn't think I would be saying this--Tk just isn't 
adequate anymore for most situations.

It's too bad. I happen to have a hypothesis that OCaml, in terms of its 
fundamental nature and its basic toolset, is a really good language for 
developing desktop applications; the main obstacles in that arena have 
to do with available libraries and deployment issues; vs., say, Web 
development, where the lack of dynamism is a serious problem.

> That means its important for us to post solutions as well as 
> questions to this list where the google web spider can find
> it.

I agree. But if I'm to post solutions, I want them to be good ones. And 
  given that the GTK API is so huge and compartmentalized, I don't have 
much confidence that the techniques I stumble upon are the right ones.

> I also wrote a bog entry on how I figure GTK+ stuff in 
> Ocaml :
> 
>     http://www.mega-nerd.com/erikd/Blog/CodeHacking/Ocaml/ocaml_and_gtk.html

That's nice, thank you. Though I'm not sure I'd say that "GTK+ developer 
documentation is pretty good." (As an old Tk hacker, maybe I've been 
spoiled by the excellent Tcl/Tk manual pages). One of several problems I 
see is that it is often very hard to discover what is a reasonable value 
for an argument to some function--maybe there's an enum somewhere that 
covers it, but how do you find its definition? And so on.

-- 
Matt Gushee
: Bantam - lightweight file manager : matt.gushee.net/software/bantam/ :
: RASCL's A Simple Configuration Language :     matt.gushee.net/rascl/ :