[plt-scheme] A Couple of Questions on DrScheme/Mzscheme

Jefferson Provost <jp at cs.utexas.edu> writes at 01:15 26-Sep-2002 -0500:
> >     in making Scheme more attractive.  (The main thing I still want is
> >     GTK bindings for MzScheme, for making really slick GUI apps...)
> 
> Can you expand on this?  In particular why MrEd's GUI toolbox isn't 
> sufficient for your needs?

I think MrEd is certainly sufficient for many prototyping needs, and it
seems to have some nice GUI constructs (e.g., the snippets used in
DrScheme's editor windows).

I've been looking at GTK bindings for a couple reasons.  One reason is
aesthetic: the underlying toolkit used by MrEd under Unix/X looks a
little dated, and not like the modern GTK-based apps that everyone else
is developing.  Some people get all disturbed when there's a 3-pixel
bevel where they think a 2-pixel one should be.

The second, more important, reason is that I also want to use libraries
like Libart and Pango, to get fairly powerful anti-aliased 2D graphics
and fonts.

(GTK is also much faster and more solid than the XUL stuff in Mozilla.)

I talked with core GTK and Gnome developers, and the obvious plan to me
has been to target GTK 2, use Pygtk2 as a model for the bindings, and
avoid any dependency on Gnome/Bonobo/Mono.

Unfortunately, I haven't allocated sufficient blocks of time to do it
myself, and I'd prefer to freeload off some clever student somewhere who
gets inspired to tackle the MzScheme-GTK problem.

-- 
                                                        Neil W. Van Dyke
                                             http://www.neilvandyke.org/