[CM] gtk in snd?

Kjetil Matheussen k.s.matheussen at gmail.com
Tue Sep 8 06:23:18 PDT 2020


I would not recommend Qt at least. It's got lots of strange bugs and
peculiar behaviors. SND is so big, that I would actually recommend
creating your own widget set, built upon SDL for instance. It will
probably save a lot of time if you spend a lot of time fighting
against the GUI. You would also save a lot of time if you write the
custom widget set in Scheme and not in C. At least this is my
experience in Radium, where half of the GUI is written in a custom
widget set, and the other half in Qt. Hopefully I will get rid of Qt
at some point, at least for GUI and graphics. Writing the code to draw
a button doesn't take much time for instance, it's not much more work
than a call to paintRoundedRectangle and a call to paintText().


On Tue, Sep 8, 2020 at 3:05 PM <bil at ccrma.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> Yes, Snd's gtk GUI was falling apart in gtk3 -- I stopped
> using it altogether.  Since gtk4 is a new beast, I've
> managed to rationalize this change: I have to start over,
> and the current code is not working, so let's get on with it.
> I'll look at other toolkits first, Juce and Qt in particular.
> If I may be allowed a digression (us old guys tend to talk
> too much); in gtk1 and gtk2 the interface was very close
> to the Motif version, leaving aside the access to openGL
> in Motif (which I greatly valued for spectrograms etc).
> In gtk3, (or thereabouts -- my memory is hazy), they
> decided to go with Cairo instead of openGL, which meant
> the "G" in "GUI" was at a dead-end.  Then smart phones
> and Wayland came along, and Gnome took over with its
> notion of a "brand" -- everything must look and act the
> same.  But Snd was aimed at the study of sounds in the
> context of music composition -- can you imagine a smaller
> niche?  Once upon a time Stanford was going through some
> "strategic" thrash, and I was asked to go down to the
> quad (the administrative offices at that time) and talk
> with someone about how to position the music department
> for the future, or some equally nebulous jargon.  I
> was so naive I actually tried to dream up some great
> ideas, then waltzed down to the quad thinking I'd get
> a confetti parade.  The guy I was supposed to meet
> had his feet on his desk (he mumbled something about
> a skiing accident), we swapped howdies, and then he
> asked: "can you justify your position on a cost basis?".
> I said no, and for the rest of the hour-long interrogation,
> they got nothing out of me but name, rank, and serial number.
> So even at Stanford, no one could figure out what I was
> up to.  Who has the resources to support such stuff?
>
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