[Haskell-cafe] Re: I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows.

[Ben Franksen]

Andrew Coppin wrote:
>   On 29/09/2010 07:33 PM, Steve Schafer wrote:
>> The issue isn't that there aren't a lot of Windows developers who have
>> an interest in Haskell+GUI development. The issue is that nearly every
>> Windows developer who looks into Haskell+GUI says, "This stuff sucks,"
>> and walks away, because they're interested in developing applications,
>> not wrestling with GUI toolkits.
> 
> Yep, that's the one.
> 
> If you want to build a GUI application in Tcl, it's going to take a
> couple of minutes to throw together some Tk commands and you're done. 

Right.

> In
> Java, you'll have to write a mile of boilerplate, but there are wizzy
> tools that will write it for you. And I gather that if you've coding in
> C or C++ or C#, you can use VisualStudio to throw a complex GUI together
> in a couple of minutes.

Not so, at least with C++. I have used VS and C++, it is horrible. Never
again.

> How do you do that in Haskell? Well, you can either install and
> configure a complete Unix emulator and then compile wxHaskell from
> source (?!), or you can use Gtk2hs, which still requires you to manually
> install and configure GTK+ and compile the entire library from source
> code. And even then, your developed application will only run on Windows
> boxes that have GTK+ installed (i.e., none of them). 

Can you not statically link the gtk libraries?

> All of which is a
> far cry from "install IDE, click some buttons, run the wizzard, job done".

I never found that this actually works. Yea, you can get *something* running
pretty fast, but as soon as you start to do stuff that is not 100% standard
off-the-shelf, you are screwed. *This* is when things become *really*
difficult. All this compiling and installing libraries stuff is harmless,
compared to the problems caused by stupidly broken APIs and crippled
languages.

Cheers
Ben