Re: Lua for GUI toolkit wrapping?

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 2:09 PM, Patrick
<spell_gooder_now@spellingbeewinnars.org> wrote:
> Having said this, toolkit support does not look so good. GTK has one
> hard working developer, QT is not so great. There is some TK support but
> do people write medium to large applications in TK?

Used to be very popular, showing its age now.  (tkinter was always the
default option for Python and it was pleasant to work with, just
didn't look so polished - which is fine by me)

> WxLua is not bad.

And, in a Windows world (I don't know about their Mono support)
LuaInterface wraps .NET nicely. I'm writing such an app at the moment,
and callbacks are such a pleasure:

ps.MouseMove:Add(function(sender,e)
    local coord = get_coordinate(ps,Point(e.X,e.Y))
    coordPanel.Text = ('(%5.1f,%5.1f)'):format(coord.X,coord.Y)
end)

(One can also do Swing apps with LuaJava)

> Is Lua not much more expressive and pleasant to work with then C/C++ ?
> wouldn't replacing all that C code for the GUI be a good thing?

There is a sense in which C/C++ is premature optimization for many
tasks, including user interface code.  But I try to leave working
applications alone ;)

> using a fast scripting language make it easier to edit later? Is there a
> reason the Toolkit support is not a little better?

OK, the problem can be if you have something larger than a few hundred
lines. Then you have to be more disciplined with Lua. You do not have
the excellent tool support combination that (say) Java + Eclipse
provides.

steve d.