Re: A BOOST GUI Library

From: Chuck Messenger (cmessenger_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-04-02 10:57:25

From: David Allan Finch <sarum_at_[hidden]>

>Hi All,
>
>I was at the ACCU Spring Confrence last week and there was
>discussion about what sort of additional libraries there might
>be. One of the ones mentioned was a 'medium' complexity
>GUI library. Leaving a side what does that mean for a moment.
>I was working on such a library 2 years ago and we came to
>a stop when the company I work for moved over to java.
>If there is any intrest in this I can make avaiable this code
>for review, to help anyone that wishes to work on such
>a project. But note currently it would be difficult for me to
>'boostify' this library. Additionally when we started this
>project (6 years ago) the STL was infancy and we implemented
>our own template collections, but it would not be that difficult to
>change them.
>
>Anyway is there any intrest?

Personally, I have a _lot_ of interest in an open cross-platform
C++ based framework.  I'm not sure what you have in mind when you
say "GUI library" -- but I'm assuming something on the order of a
replacement for MFC.  That is, a C++ layer above a native GUI
API.

Recently, I was hunting around for such a beast, and settled on
wxWindows.  It supports Win32, GTK, Motif, and (almost) Mac.
Overall, I'm quite pleased with it, although it has some problems.
For one thing, it doesn't make use of any templates.  Instead, it
has its own set of basic elements (like string class -- although
the string class is at least a super-set of std::string).

I think there's room for an open cross-platform framework which
made full use of templates and STL.  Perhaps wxWindows will
evolve into this eventually, as people become convinced that
templates are mature enough.  But perhaps not.  For now, there's
room for competition from a solid STL- (and Boost-) based
system.

     - Chuck