[M3devel] VBT and up to date desktop styling

[dirk muysers]

IUP (http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/iup/) is the easiest to interface to
from a Modula-3 point of view.

-----Original Message----- 
From: Hendrik Boom 
Sent: Sunday, December 01, 2013 11:50 PM 
To: m3devel at elegosoft.com 
Subject: Re: [M3devel] VBT and up to date desktop styling 

On Sun, Dec 01, 2013 at 07:26:21PM +0000, Elmar Stellnberger wrote:
> 
> Considering all of that if I will not have an extended vbtkit
> interfacing with another GUI component like GTK would likely be the
> way to go because otherwise there would simply be too much time to
> be invested into vbtkit not considering underlying Trestle problems
> like Unicode support yet. Though it would be good to have a well
> working standard GUI interface for Modula-3 we need to consider now
> if putting further work into Trestle/vbtkit is still worth to do. If
> so I believe it would require a joint effort.

On the face of it, switching to a portable, language-independent
user-interface library may be the way to go in the long run.

I don't see any reason why the use of Modula 3 should require a 
different user interface library from the rest of the world,
unless, of course the other libraries are crucially unsuitable or have 
unportable interfaces.

In the dark ages, Modula-3 ended up with its own UI library because
all UI libraries were hopelessly OS-specific.  Yuo even had to rewrite 
your code for different versios of an OS.

There *are* now some portable user-interface libraries.
Aren't GTK and Qt candidates for this?
Tough I'm not sure just how portable these are.

The trouble with these are that they seem to keep coming up with new, 
incompatible versions, so maintaining the interfaces and client 
software might be a neverending activity.  But there seems to be 
substantial transition periods between, say, GTK2 and GTK3 when 
both are available, so that may noot be too terrible.

Has anyone done anything towards GTK or Qt bindings for Modula 3?

-- hendrik