Re: Lush and Qt

On 8 September 2008 18:21:46 Yann LeCun wrote:
> The Lush graphic engine is definitely in need of an overhaul.
> 
> Having Qt bindings for Lush would certainly be useful to a lot of
> people. Whether to make Qt the main underlying graphic/gui engine 
> for Lush is something we should discuss.
> 
> Any ideas? Volunteers?

I think it would attract the attention of new developers to Lush. Lush would be the only
Lisp that is implemented on Qt that I know of, thus it would have the best cross-platform
GUI. It could signal a landmark that a FOSS Lisp has arrived with an up-to-date GUI environment.

My initial thought is that by going with Qt in terms of the graphics/gui it will eliminate
the need to bother with X11 code anymore (not to mention that you will be able to
run on OS X Aqua and Windows without doing much). Focus could then be put
on developing OGRE as a layer on top of Qt, bringing its dynamic nature to that
(which would be very much like what is already available in QtRuby and PyQt).

Using Qt will take care of a lot of the dependencies by virtue of having it installed,
when it is already on a system Lush could work right on top of it. This would also
mean a smaller distributable binary.

With Qt, Lush will have immediate access to all of this and more:

  - Accessibility 
  - Codecs
  - DBus
  - Database interfaces (MySQL, ODBC, PostgreSQL, Sqlite)
  - Embedded Virtual Terminal
  - GUI framework, plus QtDesigner/QtLinguist, etc.
    - QtJambi, QtRuby (PyQt?) have tools to convert the GUI forms to their language; Lush could have the same
  - Help Assistant
  - Lucene (Search engine)
  - Network
  - OpenGL
  - Phonon multimedia framework with Xine or GStreamer backends
  - SQL
  - SVG
  - Unicode
  - UnitTest framework
  - WebKit
  - XML

Some minuses:

 - Larger implementation
   - not so much when compiled to use pre-installed Qt
   - a smaller build could be configured that doesn't use Qt, fallback on the old graphics and related
     or a simple command line version without any graphics if Qt is not used (for embedded use?)
 - Much more work, needing an architecture redesign


I'd really like to see Lush do this. I've got a couple of books on Qt4 right next to me, all the latest
Qt stuff installed, extra documentation and links to related stuff. So I'm ready to help if I can.

Need more info to sway you over to considering Qt for the graphics? Check the Trolltech developers
blogs (http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/). They are doing some interesting experiments with graphics
and more that will go into future Qt implementations.


Raymond

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