Re: About the ports

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

ERDI Gergo <cactus@cactus.rulez.org> writes:

> Is there any plan to do a native Windows port of at least some subset of
> the GTK+ widgets? I mean something like using native WIndows buttons and
> lists and menus and stuff, with the GTK+ API.

A compatibility-layer toolkit is a completely different (and generally
inferior) beast to a toolkit that works from rendering primitives.

I don't know of any satisfactory compatibility-layer toolkit - the
closest is probably WxWindows. (I haven't tried it, people seem to be
reasonably happy with it.) AWT is the most common example of an
unsatisfactory one. But, in general, people seem to be happier with
toolkits like Qt and Swing which do their own rendering. (I'm not sure
exactly where Tk falls exactly - I think it emulates the native look,
but could be wrong.)

GTK+ falls into the category of doing everything from rendering
primitives, and something that ran on top of the native widgets
wouldn't really be a port of GTK+, it would be a toolkit with a GTK+
compatible API.

I used to say that porting GTK+ to Windows was just going to be a
failure - the API isn't going to map on the native Windows widgets,
and its never going to look exactly like the native widgets, no-matter
how good the theme. But I've come to realize recently that people are
shockingly tolerant of GUI's that don't follow the system standard.
Many vendors on Windows go to great length to create their own looks.

So, while it may not be great from the useability perspective, I now
think that GTK+ can be useful even if it doesn't look or act exactly
like the native Windows widgets.

Regards,
                                        Owen