"Dave Thomas" <Dave / thomases.com> writes

> "Conrad Schneiker" <schneik / us.ibm.com> writes:

> I'd also like to see a discussion of what we actually _need_. Are we
> looking for widgets, drawing capabilities, skins, ...

In my case, a modern set of usable out-of-the-box widgets. Minimally (to
first approximation), what Tk has. Plus the additional "modern" widgets of
the sort that GTK+ or wxWindows have (the lack of which in Tk has been the
source of endless complaints among increasingly many Tk users in recent
years).

And speaking of GTK+, for my general education, I'm interested in a brief
explanation about why and/or in what sense GTK+ is considered insufficiently
(or non-) OO, if someone would like to elaborate. And likewise for Tk.

> And... I'd like to discuss deployment issues too. If we want to make
> this _the_ Ruby GUI,

Hmm. How about calling it the
next|2nd|modern|mainstream|preferred|recommended Ruby GUI. You don't mean to
drop Ruby/Tk do you?

> then we need to make sure it is shipped with
> every Ruby distribution. This means binary packages for Windows users,
> and one-stop downloads for the Unix crowd.

That would be GREAT. (In the shouting sense, not in the "ASCII italics"
sense. :-)

> I'd also hope that we can
> stick the GUI stuff into DLLs under Windows: I'm not sure what the
> current state of the art is when it comes to putting C++ libraries
> into DLLs.

Looking at the wxWindows build info, most C++ issues seem to arise on Unix,
in connection with either the Gnu C++ compiler or with various Unix vendor's
C++ compilers (which are often extra-cost items (over and above extra-cost C
compilers in some cases, AFAIK) which is an additional likely problem for
some presently unknown fraction of Ruby users).

(By the way, I did not see my original/the first post of/on this thread on
comp.lang.ruby. Did anyone else?)

Conrad