Re: Lush and Qt

Hm. There are two different ways goals here. One is having Lush
be implemented atop a platform abstraction library to have less
work with keeping it portable. There are a couple such libraries,
some big ones like Qt and wxWidgets include an event system and
a broad widget toolkit. The other goal is writing a binding to a
widget toolkit for Lush. It sounds like Raymond has the first in
mind and Yann the second.

I think writing a binding is the more realistic goal. Implementing
Lush on Qt would basically mean rewriting most of it.

Thinking about widget toolkits, we would be nice to have a GUI
builder. GUI builders are typically targeted to a particular
programming language. So my guess is that QT Desginer produces
GUI code and application logic template code in C++, which we
could not flesh out with Lisp code.

I don't know how it would work with Gnome's Glade. The GTK+ folks
designed their widget toolkit with foreign language bindings in
mind, and there are tons of bindings for GTK+. My understanding
is that Glade saves a GUI description as an XML file, and libglade
parses it and builds the GUI at runtime. But I wonder how one then
integrates with the custom application code written in another
language...

Ralf





On Mon, 8 Sep 2008, Raymond Martin wrote:

> 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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