[cells-gtk-devel] SBCL patches

[Marco Gidde]

Hi Peter,

Peter Denno <peter.denno at nist.gov> writes:

> On Saturday 03 June 2006 08:21, Marco Gidde wrote:
>
>> What I miss most are much better drawing capabilities. Though I
>> managed to draw a few lines on a widget using the mentioned functions
>> I really did not get the ideas behind the API and switched to clg
>> which already has cairo bindings. Of course clg has some other
>> problems, e.g. no cells inside :-) and it is not using cffi.
>
> Do you mean you "did not get the ideas behind the API" of the drawing 
> functions, or cells-gtk in general? 

I meant the drawing functions. For instance it wasn't clear to me
whether it was possible to draw directly on the widget or whether I
had to create a pixmap which then should be copied to the widget. Also
the meaning of the special variables (e.g. *window* and friends) and
when (and why) they were set to some value wasn't clear. But as I
wrote: I succeeded in drawing a line:-) But this is certainly not a
serious critique since it is obvious that all the drawing stuff in
cells-gtk is very raw and work in progress.

> I think the biggest problem with cell-gtk is the lack of documentation of 
> Cells. And for me, some of the design choices of Cells are not intuitive, 
> making documenting it difficult.

Not sure about the cells docu: though I only read the docu and most of
the cells related discussions on c.l.l. but never used cells seriously
before, it wasn't too hard to write a small test application, always
keeping one eye on test-gtk. But the devil is in the details:
e.g. when to use fm^ and when fm-other is still a miracle to me.

> The drawing functions are a rough work-in-progress. The idea behind them 
> hasn't really been expressed yet (I had in mind something with closures, but 
> it needs lots of work). 

It was especially the amount of work that made me switch to clg. For
the basic GUI stuff (eg. buttons, menus, list-views etc.) cells-gtk
seems to be appropriate, maybe even better than cgl because of cells.

> I took a quick look at clg and Cairo. Is what you like most about clg the 
> Cairo port? clg looks ok. Cairo looks like the interesting part of it. I am 
> not a "graphics person" but just someone who needed a GUI for lisp and 
> stumbled into cells-gtk. It is good that I saw Cairo now, before I got too 
> deep into drawing. I'll play around with it next time I get a chance to work 
> on Cells-gtk.  

It is not Cairo that attracts me, it's more clg's completeness and its
nice integration with CLOS (in contrast to e.g. lambda-gtk, which is
also quite complete, but using it is like programming in C with lots
of parenthesis). While I have no problem with extending existing
packages or fixing bugs as they occur, I don't want to spend most of
my time doing this, in this case (GUI) especially because I never used
GTK in C/C++ and so my knowledge is quite limited. If I had a choice, I
would use Qt/KDE bindings, but these are essentially not existing and
creating them seems to be really hard because of C++ and the C++
extensions used by Qt.

If you think of continuing your work on the drawing functions, you
should definitely take a very close look at Cairo: Gtk+-2.8 uses it
internally for drawing the widgets!


Regards,

Marco