[boost] Re: GUI library - another one

From: Jesse Booher (jbooher_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-03-03 16:05:22

It is never a bad thing when someone is interested in donating their time to develop software to share with the world, and if there is a community of developers here with the time and motivation to develop a full featured GUI library that rises to the high standards of Boost that would be a wonderful thing.  That said a GUI library is a *HUGE* undertaking and other cross platform libraries like wxWidgets have a big head start.  Not that this is a race or anything but when it comes to GUI libraries, features nearly always trump form.  After all an awkward interface is a developer annoyance, whereas a missing feature can be a show stopper.  

There is a certain allure to clean slate designs and there may very well be no existing open source user interface projects that you would consider worthy of your time, but I wondered if you have considered any slightly less ambitious alternatives such as creating a framework employing components from an existing open source project?  It seems to me that the promise of open source development is not served when wheels (or widgets) need to be reinvented over and over again.