Re: Win32 GUI

[Martin Döring <mad@...>]

p j wrote:

> If you wanted to start almost from scratch, SDL maybe what you are 
> looking for.


Another option may be to make use of the cairo library, if you really 
want to implement your own kind of lua-like user interace, which 
possibly makes use of some specific advantages lua has. The cairo 
library provides graphics primitives for newer version of GTK+ and for 
the wellknown SWT gui for Java. (you don't want to implement graphics 
primitives in lua!) It has the advantage, that all coordinates are 
floats and that there are some "experimental" interfaces for to let 
cairo make use of modern accelerated graphics hardware via OpenGL. Like 
lua cairo is implemented in ANSI-C.

Cairo implements that part of a user interface, that GDI is for windows 
and VDI was for GEM (some of you may still know it). It includes font 
rendering, SVG and other advanced oncepts more. And you may drive it not 
only on Windows platforms, but on X11 and OpenGL later.

You should think about, if you really want to implement an own GUI and 
why, because often it could be much more satisfying to have a better 
integration in the underlying OS and just make use of it's GUI instead 
of building your own. If instead you think of some kind of lua-os on top 
of a linux kernel or such, then it might be a good thing. Lua and cairo 
could be a good base for something like the newton's gui once was. But I 
think, this is not what you want.


Info about cairo:

http://cairographics.org/introduction

Once there still had been one asking for such a binding:

http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2005-08/msg00793.html

--
Gruß, Martin Döring