[boost] Re: [gui] The Big Picture [and wxWidgets]

From: Matt S Trentini (matt_trentini_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-01-01 08:41:33

Heya Rene,

That all sounds great; perhaps we should be helping out the wx guys 
rather than come up with our own library...?

Does anyone else have any good reason why we should create a completely 
new library assuming that those issues are addressed?  (License could be 
one problem quite aside from the technical issues.)

Keep in mind that starting a GUI library from scratch is going to take 
*significant* time.

And is wxWindows our "best bet"?  It's certainly going to be easier than 
trying to convince the Qt folks to get rid of their preprocessor...  ;)

It'd be fantastic if all the issues I brought up with wxWidgets were 
addressed and we ensured that it worked well with the other boost libraries.

Is there anything anyone else wants or needs that wxWidgets couldn't 
supply?

Cheers,
Matt

PS I've started looking through the wx developer archives.  Interesting. 
  They seem to be very much in the 'early days' and moving quite slowly 
(one guy mentioned that he expected wxTNG (aka wxWidgets 3.x) to be 
delivered in 2-3 years!) but they do appear to be interested in working 
alongside boost - there was even a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that they 
submit the next revision as "boost-gui"!  Check out the following threads:

   http://tinyurl.com/533w6
   http://tinyurl.com/4ht5q
   http://tinyurl.com/6a7us
   http://tinyurl.com/4ajfy

It's worth noting that there didn't seem to be much discussion on the 
list about wxTNG - they seem to (understandably) be more concerned with 
bugfixing and ongoing development of the current builds.

They do seem to be interested in using more modern C++ features and 
exception safety was mentioned.

Oh, also, Hajo Kirchhoff (of Lit GUI library fame) has been active on 
both the boost and the wx developer discussion lists, trying to 
determine if the two groups can leverage resources.  See here for his 
boost posting (his wx postings are included in the above links):

   http://tinyurl.com/3zwxs

A collaboration sounds like a great idea to me...