[CM] gtk in snd?

[Iain Duncan]

I've done some QT, JUCE, FLTK, and WxWidgets. My opinion after doing this
is that it's a good idea to keep any external gui dependencies very
tightly controlled. As in get at them through an adapter layer or something
so that you rip them out easily enough or compile optionally with one or
the other. They have a nasty habit of changing direction dramatically every
five years or whatever, or being purchased and changing licenses. :-/

my two cents canadian
iain



On Tue, Sep 8, 2020 at 6:23 AM Kjetil Matheussen <k.s.matheussen at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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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