On 2006-01-05, Hynek Schlawack <hynek / usenet-2006.ularx.de> wrote:
> * "simonh" <simonharrison / fastmail.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> this may be a daft question, but is it possible to create a widget
>> toolkit using a scripting language? I know that most are written in C
>> / C++ (QT, fox, wx), also ncurses for terminal interfaces. Therefore,
>> is it impossible to do such a thing with ruby? Or is it just to much
>> hard work?
>
> It is possible. You'd just need an interface to the low-level graphical
> interface (in UNIX's case: X11). It's just pretty useless due to the
> poor performance that would be expectable from a scripting language.

Indeed: http://wise.rubyforge.org/

(but it's been ages since I worked on it; Xlib is a beast, a monster; lots
of speedup can be achieved, e.g. communicating with the X server is slower
than a few Ruby calls; The more interesting discussions on a toolkit are
about the Ruby API, not the underlying implementation -- if I read "closely
matches the C(++) API", I immediately think "so it is not Ruby")

But why the question? *curious*