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> Just a project to bind an existing GUI toolkit into your favorite language can easily overwhelm a dedicated team of multiple people I have to disagree, it's

> Just a project to bind an existing GUI toolkit into your favorite language can easily overwhelm a dedicated team of multiple people I have to disagree, it's not that hard and can be done by one person. Red language did it, it has very clear declarative GUI toolkit for Win/macOS/GTK in <2MB executable. So no, it's not that hard.

jerf 3y ago
At 2MB in size, I guarantee you beyond a shadow of a doubt that it does not satisfy the test I gave in my other message, nor does it pass the test that if you ask a designer to design you a form, the toolkit will be able to do what the designer wants. At that size you've got a programmer GUI toolkit, that as long as it is used by a programmer who is willing to live within its constraints, it will work fine, but it won't satisfy anyone else. To put it another way, Window's Wordpad is an OK document editor, if you're happy to live within its constraints... but it's no replacement for a Word document being shared over Sharepoint with change tracking between multiple people before finally going out to 1,000 people via a mail merge. There's a ton of Wordpad-class GUI toolkits. There's not very many Word-class GUI toolkits. I mean, I'm sure Tk is much more featureful than can be fit into 2MB and it's honestly barely in the "works for programmers" class. It's really nice for programmers, too, but it isn't going to replace QT anytime soon.
- hulitu 3y ago
  What has Sharepoint to do with a GUI Toolkit ?
  - jerf 3y ago
    In that metaphor, the 2MB GUI toolkit is Wordpad, and QT is Word. I find the analogy particularly apt because it is often said of Word "Everyone uses only 10% of Word but everyone uses a different 10%", and the same is true of GUI toolkits. Once you get out of the super-basics of text widgets and radio buttons, you're in a hugely diverse world where nobody is using the same thing but to be a "real GUI toolkit" you need to support them, like, table widgets with complicated lazy loading, rich text widgets rich enough to implement a full custom editor, arbitrarily complicated graphing libraries, OpenGL support, internationalization and FULL Unicode support (far beyond merely the rendering of text), and so on and so on. I mean, take a minute and click through this: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/classes.html https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/classes.html Some of it is because QT is also a framework, but a lot of it is there for a GUI toolkit reason. Just blipping through that, a list of features that are absolute drop dead requirements for someone out there that I didn't think to mention includes: Printer support, animation support, OAuth support, canvas support, filesystem support (for that open dialog and friends), font interaction for if you need direct rendering, help support, alternate calendar support, video support, and who knows what else I missed. Few apps need all these things, but there's plenty of apps in the world that absolutely, positively need at least one of those things.

jerf 3y ago

At 2MB in size, I guarantee you beyond a shadow of a doubt that it does not satisfy the test I gave in my other message, nor does it pass the test that if you ask a designer to design you a form, the toolkit will be able to do what the designer wants. At that size you've got a programmer GUI toolkit, that as long as it is used by a programmer who is willing to live within its constraints, it will work fine, but it won't satisfy anyone else. To put it another way, Window's Wordpad is an OK document editor, if you're happy to live within its constraints... but it's no replacement for a Word document being shared over Sharepoint with change tracking between multiple people before finally going out to 1,000 people via a mail merge. There's a ton of Wordpad-class GUI toolkits. There's not very many Word-class GUI toolkits. I mean, I'm sure Tk is much more featureful than can be fit into 2MB and it's honestly barely in the "works for programmers" class. It's really nice for programmers, too, but it isn't going to replace QT anytime soon.

hulitu 3y ago
What has Sharepoint to do with a GUI Toolkit ?
- jerf 3y ago
  In that metaphor, the 2MB GUI toolkit is Wordpad, and QT is Word. I find the analogy particularly apt because it is often said of Word "Everyone uses only 10% of Word but everyone uses a different 10%", and the same is true of GUI toolkits. Once you get out of the super-basics of text widgets and radio buttons, you're in a hugely diverse world where nobody is using the same thing but to be a "real GUI toolkit" you need to support them, like, table widgets with complicated lazy loading, rich text widgets rich enough to implement a full custom editor, arbitrarily complicated graphing libraries, OpenGL support, internationalization and FULL Unicode support (far beyond merely the rendering of text), and so on and so on. I mean, take a minute and click through this: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/classes.html https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/classes.html Some of it is because QT is also a framework, but a lot of it is there for a GUI toolkit reason. Just blipping through that, a list of features that are absolute drop dead requirements for someone out there that I didn't think to mention includes: Printer support, animation support, OAuth support, canvas support, filesystem support (for that open dialog and friends), font interaction for if you need direct rendering, help support, alternate calendar support, video support, and who knows what else I missed. Few apps need all these things, but there's plenty of apps in the world that absolutely, positively need at least one of those things.