[gmpi] Re: Requirements
- From: Paul Davis <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: gmpi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2003 10:46:41 -0500
>Question: how many toolkits of significant importance are there out there?
>And are there any abstraction/unification libraries sitting on top of the
>toolkits that would allow you to build an app to run on top of several
>different toolkits just by setting an #define?
there are 2 major toolkits (GTK and Qt), plus around half a dozen
others (FLTK (used by Csound these days), Motif, XForms, ...). GTK and
Qt are of roughly equal popularity. Motif is the one that proprietary
people used to use (e.g. VSTGUI exists|existed for it), but it has
faded and faded to the point of utter irrelevance at this point.
wxWindows is a cross-platform library that sits on top of the "native"
toolkit. some people i know seem to like it, but mostly for its
cross-platform-ness. i suspect (though i don't know for sure) that i
could not have written ardour with wxWindows, because in the course of
abstracting the API, it throws away too much good stuff that is
specific to a given toolkit. not certain though - i haven't tried it.
this is the central problem with the
abstraction-to-cover-different-API approach: each "native API" has
some stuff that just doesn't fit into the least-common-denominator
and so it gets dropped from the abstraction. but it was there for a
reason, and now its gone ...
>Just a thought... is it definitely a better system to have each plugin
>window in a seperate process vs. having them all in the same process but
>having to provide different binaries for different toolkits?
its not (just) different binaries: its totally different GUI
code. imagine writing your GUIs even just twice, once with VSTGUI and
once with the regular win32 API. how similar would they be? how much
like writing two GUIs would that be?
--p
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