RE: wxLua on OS X?

["Nick Trout" <nick@...>]

> What I am looking for is a toolkit that is totally devoted to GUI and
> nothing else. For example no sockets, no threading and synchronization
> facilities.

But when you are porting, or maintaining, a cross platform application
there are other issues, like threading. So I can see how these become
part of such a code base, although they should probably be a separate
library.

> I have looked at TkLua, wxLua, Lua FLTK, Lui and IUP; none of the
current
> solutions satisfy the requirements I have (in my mind).
> 
> On the wild side, I have been spending some time investigating at
> potential
> candidates that meet the requirements at least from what I have read
about
> them. These are in no particular order:
> 	-- The fox toolkit <http://www.fox-toolkit.org>
> 	-- Java SWT from eclipse project
> <http://www.eclipse.org/articles/index.html>

I had a look for one a while ago as I was trying to write a cross
platform IDE for Lua. Perhaps this would be of interest to you:

	http://lua-users.org/wiki/VisLuaImplementation

When I looked at Fox it wasn't working on as many platforms, or has such
a large useful widget set as WX. Wouldn't SWT require a Java VM install?
Do you mean AWT or SWT - as it's from Eclipse? AWT uses native
non-portable widgets.


> However there is no gaurantee that they will remain so. For example
the
> author of fox toolkit is currently investigating on how to provide a
> HTML browser widget and I am sure any implementation would lead to
adding
> socket support to the library thus making even this toolkit a bit
"fat".
> An ideal marriage would be to find a toolkit that provides absolutely
> bare minimum of GUI abstractions and platform portability and the rest
> gets built using Lua itself. That is why I am leaning towards porting
> SWT to Lua, since only the very low level widget code is written
> in "C" and the rest is written using Java. The trouble is that I am
> still learning Lua and this is not a trivial excercise. And I do not
> want to use "toLua" since that again introduces a dependency.

I've settled on WX and I'll accept its size and shortcoming because it
has such good support, is bound to lots of scripting languages and is so
portable.

--nick