What's the status of the GTk binding for Mozart ?

[Andreas Rossberg]

Leif Kornstaedt wrote:
> 
> Development at the PS Lab has moved on to a GTK binding for Alice.
> The latter grew out of the Mozart/GTK binding, but both sources
> have quickly diverged.

In fact, the current Alice Gtk binding (which is for Gtk 2.x) is a 
complete reimplementation, done by a student under Thorsten's 
supervision. For generation it uses CKit, an ML library for parsing C 
code, and will hence not be portable back to Oz easily.

>>- what about the cross-platform compatibility ?
> 
> The binding at least works on Microsoft Windows and various
> Unix/X Window System platforms.

Since I had a great time fighting with Gtk on Windows over the last 
three weeks I should give a slight warning. Gtk works under Windows, but 
can cause problems. In particular, the trinity Windows+Emacs+Gtk turned 
out to be a serious trouble maker. So far, we were unable to get Gtk 
(and hence the Alice Inspector) running reliably under Emacs - on some 
Windows boxes it just doesn't work, for incomprehensible reasons (Gtk 
hanging in basic calls like gtk_widget_show).

>>- are there other things I should know about GTk ?

One thing you should note about the Gtk binding for Mozart (as well as 
the one for Alice) is that they are low-level and completely unsafe. 
Passing in garbage to a Gtk function can easily segfault. I don't like 
this at all.

	- Andreas

-- 
Andreas Rossberg, rossberg at ps.uni-sb.de

Let's get rid of those possible thingies!  -- TB