SEUL: gui toolkits

["Luka@pop3.aracnet.com (Peter)" <luka@mit.edu>]

speaking of python - has anyone here actually used it much?

if so, i'd like to hear about it: how easy is it to learn, how robust is it,
and how fast is it?  also, if it's been around long enough for this judgement,
how well does it deal when good ol' tk goes and ups the major revision?
does it make any attempt to not break?

so, for seul gui coding, here's my current outlook...
i'm an xlib hacker myself, but when i say that people usually scream and
run away, so i think we'll want something less torturous for seul
programmers to work with.
tk is not bad.  the main danger is that its authors seem to feel no
need for backwards compatibility between major revisions, and btw, they
should be upping the major rev again sometime soon, though i don't
know the inside scoop on just when to expect it.

however, there are several interfaces to tk.  the most common is
tcl, which is evil because it is maintained by the same guys as tk,
and they follow the same tradition of incompatiblity.  there are
also a lot of other "features" which not everyone likes about tcl's
actual structure (such as the tendency of everything to be represented
as a string, and thus a certain difficulty with any non-runtime debugging).
in short, tcl/tk is much used, but not very good.

perl/tk i think may be the way for us to go.  i've tried it out recently,
to some extent.  the perl/tk module is remarkably fast and stable from
what i've sampled.
perl will probably be making a major appearance in seul system software anyway,
and lots of people already know it (or can learn it in a couple days), plus
perl's tk interface is also easy to learn.  this is important because
we don't want programmers who join the seul project to have to learn huge,
obscure new languages in order to function.

c/tk i have not tried, but from what i've heard its not worth the
effort to learn the interface.  you may as well just either use xlib,
or invoke a tcl/whatever/tk interpreter from c, depending on how much
effort you want to put in.  this is only what i've heard though, so clue me
in if you know more about this topic.

and as i said, i have not tried python yet.  my current opinion, however,
would be that it is an extra thing to install and maintain, plus it is
an entire extra language for our programmers to learn, so i would rather
see us learning tcl or perl, which are more commonly useful, and reusing
that in other areas, unless there is something really cool about python
that i don't know yet.

if someone knows of other gui toolkits that would be useful for seul,
please mention them as well, so we can look into them now.

-luka, seul dev leader
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