Message-ID: <44D39E24.5060309 at rftp.com>
Date: Fri, 04 Aug 2006 12:21:08 -0700
From: Robert Roessler <robertr at rftp.com>
Organization: Robert's High-performance Software
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: lablgtk at math.nagoya-u.ac.jp
Subject: Re: Rendering an image on a canvas?
References: <44D2455B.6000200 at gushee.net> <44D24DF8.30601 at gushee.net> <44D269FE.3030902 at gushee.net> <44D26FFB.9090109 at rftp.com> <44D2765B.9060000 at gushee.net> <44D2A5B4.9020407 at rftp.com> <44D381DE.80005 at gushee.net>
In-Reply-To: <44D381DE.80005 at gushee.net>
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Matt Gushee wrote:
> Robert Roessler wrote:
> 
>> This scarcity is unfortunate, since combining the coolness and fairly 
>> wide applicability of OCaml with GTK in all its "baroqueness" (not 
>> necessarily to be confused with "brokenness"), LablGTK has the makings 
>> of a viable cross-platform GUI toolkit...
> 
> Well, in a purely technical sense, I think it already is that. I'm not 
> sure I'm really qualified to judge, but I think GTK is pretty 
> well-coded. Notice I don't say well-designed ... maybe some day if I 
> ever understand its design I will have an opinion on that. But I've been 
> following GTK for a long time, and have always felt that its developers 
> have a very cavalier attitude to the users of their software. To give 
> one example, the old list widget is deprecated in favor of GTree. Why? 
> Well, the rationale given in the docs is essentially "because it's 
> better." So now a list is a special case of a tree (??!), and we need a 
> minimum of 4 objects where 1 was sufficient before.
> 
> Okay, sorry to rant. In any case, my issue is with GTK itself, not with 
> LablGTK.

Something I just noticed that fits right in with the "viable 
cross-platform GUI toolkit" bit is that [on SourceForge] the "GTK+ and 
The GIMP installers for Windows" are the 10th highest-downloaded 
package of all time (@ ~14.7M)... the only items higher are the 
Bittorrent and other file-sharing packages (and of course the 
perennial favorite, CDex).

While it's too bad that the "one-click" installer for the GTK+ runtime 
for Windows is not tracked independently of the GIMP, it is probably 
safe to say that not all of these downloads are by aspiring artists 
(or counterfeiters).

Robert Roessler
robertr@rftp.com
http://www.rftp.com