[plt-scheme] Using a UI language for PLT Scheme

On Wed, 2004-02-11 at 22:08, Shriram Krishnamurthi wrote:
> We had some students at Brown play with intergrating XUL into a
> programming environment being developed here.  It seems way too
> premature for significant use.

Did they find it missing functionality, too slow, or both?

If you open Mozilla Firebird (Firefox?)'s browser.jar you'll see its UI
is really browser.xul, and the browser doesn't seem slow to me.

> The others don't sound like great options.  It seems impossible to
> mention Qt without provoking a Freedom war;

Trolltech changed their licensing schemes and it seems more palatable
now.  The free implementation of Qt for Windows might be too slow
though.

>  XAML is, afaik,
> platform-specific; and I believe GNOME/GTK doesn't run as widely as
> wx.

GTK is now ported to Win32 and OS X:
http://gtk-osx.sourceforge.net/

That's the native interface.  You could also use the XDarwin version
sitting in fink, I think.

>   Only Mozilla/XUL seems to have the same breadth.
> 
> I don't think this is a bad idea in the long run, but I just don't
> sense these technologies are up to the mark yet.
> 
> Also, when you say "there are programs that translate ... to ...", how
> complete and thorough are they?  Do they really accept the full
> language as input and produce legal output?  Or are they typical
> prototypes that don't work too well once you leave the subset of terms
> the author found easy to translate?  (Wouldn't be the first time.)

It does look like these projects have not really left the experimental
stage...


Daniel