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

[Richard O'Keefe]

On 30/09/2010, at 7:08 AM, Christopher Done wrote:

> On 29 September 2010 17:01,  <caseyh at istar.ca> wrote:
>> I still cannot seem to get a GUI working under Windows.
>> 
>> For Haskell GUI's is Ubuntu easier to setup.
>> 
>> If so, we're losing people if Haskell GUI's are so hard to get working under
>> Windows.
> 
> We're losing people! Charge!
> 
> I think the problem is lack of Windows developers interested in GUIs,
> and that Windows is not so POSIXy-development-friendly as Linux or OS
> X. But mostly lack of people interested in that area, I think.

I think we should put this in perspective.
I teach a full-year 300-level software engineering paper.
This year the students were required to design a project of their
own and start to build it in Windows using C or C++.
Then we switched them to Linux -- it's an education, not a picnic!
For the final deliverable, they had to provide something I could
run on one of the department's Macs running Linux.

Welcome to DLL Hell.

Of course I made a good faith attempt to try to install the libraries
that they provided (if they did) but without superuser access there
are limits; I also made a good faith attempt to download and build
libraries they did not provide, but my patience has its limits and I
wasn't prepared to spend more than an hour per assignment doing this.
And of course there's the 64-bit -vs- 32-bit thing, where 32-bit
programs are *supposed* to run on 64-bit Linux, but some of the 32-bit
libraries required to make this actually work are missing...

Unless you are willing to work at the level of Xt or possibly Lesstif,
portability of GUI software on Linux in C or C++ does not come
automatically; you have to work at it.

Don't get me started on "everyone has the same kind of screen I do..."