Re: LuaMotif

[Marc Balmer <marc@...>]

Am 06.04.12 03:15, schrieb Miles Bader:
> Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com> writes:
>> When would one use LuaMotif, and when would one use wxLua? I'm not
>> familiar with declarative style, but a glance at the website you
>> referenced looked quite a bit like wxPython.
> 
> It also looks quite a bit like iup's input language.
> 
> Also, when playing around with lua-gtk, which largely just replicates
> the C interface (modulo automatic GC etc), it was pretty clear how easy
> it would be to write a higher-level wrapper layer for Lua .... that
> basically resembles what iup or luamotif does.

Yes, in fact GTK and OpenMotif are somewhat similar and it should not be
too difficult to apply the luamotif principles to luagtk.

luamotif started as a wrapper around the C interface, so programming
Motif programs in Lua was as tedious as writing them in C.  It was only
when we switched to the declarative style (which was not that easy at
all) when it got really super easy to use.

I would say the nice thing about LuaMotif is that it hides most of Motif ;)

> 
> I dunno about motif, but wxwindows is pretty bloated and huge (even
> _without_ the backend GUI libraries it uses to do the real work), to the
> point where I'm hesitant to write anything that would depend on it.
> 
> What would be _really_ neat would be a common Lua GUI interface that
> could be supported by any of these various GUI libraries...
> [maybe that's IUP?  I dunno, it's so crazily annoying to get working
> that I've never managed to get very far with it!]

All these GUI toolkits probably have pros and cons, which already starts
with the license, but extends to technical questions like memory
footprint, platforms, look and feel etc.


> 
> -miles
>