OpenEuphoria

2. Re: A new GUI/Widget Toolkit?

• Posted by ChrisB (moderator) Feb 02, 2022
• 1232 views

Hi Andy

I think that's a bit of a task there. How from 'scratch' do you want it to be. Other GUI toolkits are cross platform, because they are effectively interfaces to the 'baseline' APIs - the windows API or the Xlib API, a call to the theoretical toolkit goes to the relevant API depending on OS etc. So all the hard work is done for you.

A worthy, but difficult, task anyway.

4. Re: A new GUI/Widget Toolkit?

• Posted by petelomax Feb 02, 2022
• 1211 views

What you really need in the first place is a simple canvas occupying a window, on which you can draw decent-quality text (so not SDL!).
Get that working cross-platform before you start adding any bells and whistles. Most toolkits go the wrong way about that, getting it all
really fancy on one platform and then facing a mountain of work and fresh compromises that a breadth-first approach would avoid (or
at least get correct much earlier in the process). "I'll do Linux later" would be a big turn-off for me (ditto "Windows later").

I would urge you to take a look at https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Polynomial_regression#Phix which can be run online here.
Gloss over the fact that it is written in IUP, focus on the fact it is effectively less than 285 lines, and (effectively) written in pure Phix.
There is no need to put C into the mix, imnsho, or at the very least strive for the absolute bare minimum performance-critical parts.

What I'd really be interested in is a toolkit which is fundamentally based on the HTML/JavaScript/CSS box model (with extreme emphasis
on the word model, I'm not suggesting you implement CSS on the desktop!), or at least something that could easily be transpiled to that.

6. Re: A new GUI/Widget Toolkit?

• Posted by Icy_Viking Feb 02, 2022
• 1173 views

Thanks for all the advice.

I'll look more into this libui-ng. Its caught my interest for now. I did use wxEuphoria back in the day. I wouldn't mind trying to help out to get it going again or get it ready for Eu 4.2.0.

8. Re: A new GUI/Widget Toolkit?

• Posted by Bhupen1277 Feb 04, 2022
• 1112 views

I am vary of new "toys".
We have a well tried and developed wxWidgets than needs bringing up to the current version and there are many experts in this forum good at creating DLLs. I have not seen a single reason why there should not be a current version (except my own that I don't know how to )

10. Re: A new GUI/Widget Toolkit?

• Posted by petelomax Feb 04, 2022
• 1109 views

Corrected link: https://github.com/OpenEuphoria/wxEuphoria - in case anyone was thinking of asking that's all completely incompatible with Phix, since it embeds Eu-specifics right inside the dll/so, such as struct s1 and the MAKE_SEQ() macro. Not to worry, libui-ng looks like a better bet to me anyway, should I really need anything else to do(!)

12. Re: A new GUI/Widget Toolkit?

• Posted by Icy_Viking Feb 04, 2022
• 1059 views

I'm having trouble getting libui-ng compiled into a DLL. I tried following all the directions, but I just couldn't get it to build. I'll see if there's some other things I can try.

As for the Flutter desktop, it does look nice, but the engine backend is written in CPlusPlus, so its OOPy, and its written for Dart, so there may be some issues when trying to make a wrapper for it.

Something like Flutter Desktop or FLTK or some other GUI written in CPlusPlus and not C may be written when Eu 4.2.0 releases, which should have struct support. It might make wrapping CPlusPlus a tad easier. Though I do like how easy C code is to read and its pretty portable.

A C interface to wxWidgets would be nice too. I saw there was a C port of wxWidgets, but it is old and no longer updated or maintained.

14. Re: A new GUI/Widget Toolkit?

• Posted by ryanj Feb 04, 2022
• 1055 views

*Cough* Redy *Cough* LOL

But seriously, that's exactly what I did with Redy, except it's pure euphoria. I wrapped all the basic win32 api to create windows, handle events, and draw to bitmaps. Eventually, I added more advanced features like clipboard functions. It took me years, and it's still not finished. But, I learned so much from it. I gained a good understanding of the foundational win32 api. Those concepts can be carried over to linux. I haven't had time to port Redy to linux yet, but I basically understand how it could be done. I also learned a ton about optimization! The first few versions of Redy were horribly slow, but the version that RedyCode is built upon is amazingly fast, except for a few odd things here and there. I also learned a ton about important programming concepts, such as object-oriented and reactive programming. Even though Euphoria doesn't technically have those features, I was able to structure my code in a way that followed those concepts. And I also learned a lot of things that I could have done better, and would like to improve, but it would require a lot of rework.

I would suggest looking up the API documentation for windows and/or linux for creating windows, handling events, and drawing graphics. All the general API stuff. Ignore the controls/widget libraries, just look at the raw graphics stuff, and learn how to handle mouse/keyboard events, and draw/load/save bitmaps in memory, and how to manipulate windows and draw to them. It will take a lot of planning and good structure to define your own widget classes and how they interact with each other, as objects in a tree, with parent/child relationships. It's a lot of work, but it's definitely doable and is a great learning experience!