Applications and libraries/GUI libraries

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This page contains a list of libraries and tools in a certain category. For a comprehensive list of such pages, see Applications and libraries.

Graphical User Interface Libraries

There is a large number of GUI libraries for Haskell. Unfortunately there is no standard one and all are more or less incomplete. The following list gives an overview. In general, low-level veneers are going well, but they are low level. High-level abstractions are pretty experimental. There is a need for a supported medium-level GUI library.

High-level:	FranTk	Fudgets	Fruit and wxFruit	(Haggis)	Phooey	GuiTV
Medium-level:	wxHaskell	Gtk2HS	HGL (graphics only)	Object I/O
Low-level veneers:	GLUT	TclHaskell	Win32	X11

Curses.hsc

A minimal binding to curses (as well as ncurses). Smaller and less featured than hscurses, it also provides fast packed string support.

FranTk

is a library for building GUIs in Haskell. FranTk uses behaviours and events, concepts from Conal Elliot's Functional Reactive Animation. FranTk provides good support for developing complex dynamic systems, and is built on top of Tcl-Tk. This makes it platform independent. FranTk was developed by Meurig Sage. For Unix and Windows.

Fruit

Another high-level approach to GUI's in Haskell. It is based on the concepts of Functional Reactive Programming and arrows. There is also another implementation of this approach, called wxFruit. It is implemented on top of wxHaskell.

Fudgets

Fudgets is primarily a Graphical User Interface Toolkit for the functional programming language Haskell and the X Windows system. Fudgets also makes it easy to create client/server applications that communicate via the Internet. Programming with Fudgets: A short presentation of the Fudget Library and the ideas underlying it. For Unix, not Windows.

GuiTV

GuiTV is a small library for GUI-style visualizing functional values. It can also be viewed as an approach to functional GUIs. It is implemented very simply by using Phooey in the TV framework.

Gtk2Hs

Gtk2Hs is a GUI library for Haskell based on Gtk+. Gtk+ is an extensive and mature multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. Gtk2Hs is actively developed, supporting the latest version of the Gtk+ 2.x series. It provides automatic memory management, Unicode support and also bindings for various Gnome modules. It runs on Windows, Linux, MacOS X, FreeBSD and Solaris.

hscurses

A Haskell binding to the NCurses library, a library of functions that manage an application's display on character-cell terminals. hscurses also provides some basic widgets implemented on top of the ncurses binding, such as a text input widget and a table widget.

HTk

Htk is a typed, portable encapsulation of Tcl/Tk into Haskell. Its distinctive features are the use of Haskell types and type classes for structuring the interface, an abstract notion of event for describing user interaction, and portability across Windows, Unix and Linux.

HToolkit

HToolkit is a portable Haskell library for writing graphical user interfaces (GUI's). The library is built upon a low-level interface that will be implemented for each different target platform. The low-level library is called Port and is currently implemented for GTK and Windows. The middle-level library is named GIO (the Graphical IO library) and is built upon the low-level Port library.

Object I/O for Haskell

A port of Clean Object I/O library for Haskell

Phooey

A simple, functional, arrow-based library. Currently implemented atop wxHaskell. Phooey supports dynamic input bounds, flexible layout, and mutually-referential widgets.

TclHaskell

TclHaskell is a library of functions for writing platform independent, graphical user interfaces in Haskell. The library provides a convenient, abstract and high-level way to write window-oriented applications. It also provides a more low level interface to write primitive Tcl code where helpful. For Unix and Windows (and Macintosh?).

wxHaskell

wxHaskell is a portable and native GUI library built on top of wxWindows - a comprehensive C++ library that is portable across all major GUI platforms; including GTK, Windows, X11, and MacOS X. wxWindows is a mature library (in development since 1992) that supports a wide range of widgets with the native look-and-feel, and it has a very active community.

An addition to wxHaskell, Functional Forms is a combinator library/domain specific language which enables a very concise programming style for forms: dialogs which only show and edit a set of values. Forms are used in many applications as Options or Settings dialogs.

FG

An arrow-based high-level functional approach to composable GUIs, built on top of Gtk2Hs. It is inspired by Fruit but uses discrete events instead of continuous signals.

Unsupported GUI-libraries

The following libraries seem to be no longer maintained. However, someone might pick up one of them or at least profit from some design ideas.

Budgets

A library of Fudget-like combinators based on the Openlook widget library was developed by Alastair Reid and Satnam Singh. The code has suffered tremendous bit-rot (does anyone have a copy of ghc-0.16?) but all the reusable ideas are described in the paper.

Embracing Windows

is a framework for developing graphical user interfaces. It runs under Windows 95 using a modified version of Hugs 1.3.

Gadgets

Lazy functional components for graphical user interfaces, developed by Rob Noble under the supervision of Colin Runciman (LNCS 982, pages 321-340).

Gtk+HS a Haskell binding for GTK+

This library provides a transcription of the original GTK+ API into Haskell. GTK+ is a modern, portable GUI library and forms the basis of the Gnome desktop project. The binding, while not complete, covers most of GTK+'s core functionality and is ready for use in applications that require a GUI of medium complexity. Developed under Unix, but should also be usable with the Windows port of GTK+.

Haggis

Haggis is a graphical user interface framework for the functional language Haskell, running under the X Window system. It is being developed using the Glasgow Haskell Compiler with its concurrent extensions to achieve more comfortable interaction with the outside world.

iHaskell

A functional wrapper on top of GTK+HS that provides convenience functions for frequently used programming patterns and eliminates the need for explicit mutable variables.

Pidgets

developed by Enno Scholz unifies pictures and widgets in a constraint-based framework for concurrent functional GUI programming.