On Wed, 16 May 2001, Steve Tuckner wrote:
> Would it be a good idea to develop a pure Ruby GUI framework built on top of
> a basic bitblt capability that would be portable across many operating
> systems (ala smalltalk's GUI or Java Swing). Would such a GUI be fast
> enough? Is it worth doing?

I'd be ready to do that on top of Xlib, and actually cooperating with
Xlib. I think the GUI would be fast enough in that case. If OTOH the GUI
tries to do all by itself and then sends only a bunch of Pixmaps to X11,
then you get a whole lot of slowness.

About portability... I don't think I'd do any special effort to support
Win32/Mac/NeXT/BeOS, but OTOH I think good design will lead us to
portability "accidentally" anyway =)

> It would certainly be a mammoth effort.

Depends on how it's designed. For example, Xlib by itself is a mammoth. My
technique for building it consists in first reducing the mammoth into a
cow while keeping the same functionality. Then I implement the cow. It's
still much bigger than a mouse, but no-one believes a mouse is enough
anyway. 

A GUI toolkit or framework is a different task, but I think it can be
simpler than Swing. =) (I'm not aiming for yet another Tk/Gtk either)

matju