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On 25/08/2011 11.37, Miles Bader wrote:
Alex Queiroz<asandroq@gmail.com>  writes:
I've sometimes pondered the possibility of a lightweight Lua GUI kit
that provided an abstraction over a native back-end, e.g. the Windows
version would use the Windows API, the Linux version would use GTK, OS
X would use Cocoa. Just the basic common functionality, emphasis on
small footprint.

Sounds like IUP.

Yeah... unfortunately, IUP seems a bit hard to get going due to the
build infrastructure it uses.

I thought one of the devs mentioned they had tried to improve the
build behavior, but it still didn't seem very friendly last time I
tried it, a month or two ago.

[By "didn't seem very friendly" I mean: "failed to compile out of the
box, reading docs and poking around at the makefiles didn't make it
obvious how to get it working, and eventually I ran out of patience."

Exactly what it happened to me a some months ago! I couldn't have described it better!

I imagine someone who _really_ wants to make it compile could make it
work with enough effort...]

Unfortunately, since my C skills are limited, I gave up quite early.


I suppose something like GTK+ or Qt may also be hard to compile from
scratch, but on the other hand, they're usually available
pre-installed or pre-packaged anyway, so for most people it doesn't
matter.

It would be very nice to have such a possibility for IUP & friends. I don't know very much about them, but seem a good alternative for lightweight GUI.

On a related note, I wonder why no-one has mentioned wxLua (bindings to wxWidgets). It is not a GUI-only library, but it is fairly stable (even if a bit outdated). Not too lightweight (~10MB the needed DLLs on windows), but neither huge, at least for PC platforms (smart phones may be another story).


-Miles


-- Lorenzo