Re: [Chicken-users] cross-platform gui toolkit

[Thomas Christian Chust]

John Cowan wrote:

> [...]
> If you want a small stable toolkit, use Tk.  It's not sexy and earlier
> versions didn't have native L&F, but it works.  Best yet, we already
> have an egg for it.
> [...]

Hello,

I vote against Tk, because in my humble opinion

* Tk is not a small toolkit and it bloats your applications even more
  because you need a second scripting runtime -- Tcl or Perl -- to use
  it. I find that only acceptable if I'm programming in Tcl or Perl
  anyway.

* Tk is not very stable -- some experience with Perl/Tk teaches me that
  it's extremely easy to produce segfaults and infinite hangs with
  seemingly correct Tk code for obscure reasons.

* Tk is not very portable -- even screen coordinates for drawing in
  canvasses work differently on Windows and Unix implementations of Tk.

* I don't like the idea of using the CHICKEN Tk egg for production code
  because a GUI library should not need to spawn a different language
  interpreter subprocess and control GUI interaction by reading and
  writing code to and from a pipe.

  That's like controlling a database by spawning an SQL shell and
  interacting with it using pipes. I don't think it's a clean approach.
  And of course its very inefficient too, especially given the fact that
  Tcl evaluates strings to strings all the time...

cu,
Thomas