[Openmcl-devel] Lisp User Interface LUI

[Brian Mastenbrook]

On Jan 14, 2009, at 7:19 PM, Alexander Repenning wrote:

> I can't say that I am huge fan of C++
>
> Based on all the input so far I would conclude on the Mac side to  
> continue with LUI by building a shallow Cocoa wrapper on Macs (e.g.,  
> using generic names: details in diagram below) and building the same  
> class hierarchy  on Win and implementing it on top of the win32  
> api.  I am not sure that much is to be gained by adding a layer  
> between win api and Lisp. C++ as intermediate layer could be ugly  
> and other tools that based on scripting languages (e.g, Ruby) could  
> be slow.
>
> Once we have a good FFI for CCL win would it really be that hard to  
> access the win api directly?

Alex and others on the list,

Have you seen Cocotron (@ http://www.cocotron.org/ )? It is an open  
source project to provide a MIT-licensed implementation of the Cocoa  
APIs on Windows (and they are considering supporting other platforms  
in the future). Perhaps it would be less effort in the long run to  
rely on a project like this than implementing a new cross-platform API.

Qt theoretically does this too but like others I am not a huge fan of C 
++. If your solution is all C or C++ then Qt is probably the easiest  
way to get a cross-platform GUI. But it can't be bound to very easily.

Another option might be to use Cocoa on OS X and GTK+ on Linux and  
Windows. GTK+ applications look very good on Windows, and the API is  
much cleaner than the native Win32 APIs.
--
Brian Mastenbrook
brian at mastenbrook.net
http://brian.mastenbrook.net/

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