[PD-dev] PD canvas interaction - flext GUI

[guenter geiger]

On Thu, 17 Oct 2002, Thomas Grill wrote:
> I'm afraid that GTK is not as portable as desired.
> I'm for wxWindows.... but that's nothing new......
>

Two thoughs:

A multithreaded solution might be really faster than the socket
communication we have now, but it doesn't solve the problem from the
root, which is, actually a communication overhead from the GUI to
the engine.

Therefore I would (this is really merely theroretical, but as I see that
there are several people interested in doing things with the GUI, I might
as well say how I would do it, if I had the time and motivation).

First, get rid of the communication overhead. Build a clean layer between
a GUI abstraction (and not an implementation how it is now) and the
engine.. if desired with different ways of communication (threaded,
sockets, ...)

Then we can think of porting to QT, gtk, wxwindows, whatever.

Another thing that could be done is extending the GUI on the TCL/TK side,
ala "snack", for example. This would reduce overhead for expensive
GUI objects, because functionality is built into the widgets.

tcl/tk allows you to add new widgets, which makes the GUI a lot nicer.
I did some experiments too with that, and came to the conclusion that it
can be done with tcl/tk.

Guenter