Re: [Help-smalltalk] GNU Smalltalk on OS X with native GTK

[Eli Green]

On Tuesday, October 13, 2009, at 10:19AM, "Paolo Bonzini" <address@hidden> 
wrote:
>
>> For the Cocoa may be we can create a binding. I don't know
>> how much time it will take ...
>
>Not much, but as usual it's a matter of priorities.
>

find . -name \*.st | xargs grep -c -i gtk | awk -F : 'BEGIN { total = 0; count 
= 0 } { total += 1; if ($2) count += 1 } END { print total, count }'

I think it would actually be a pretty serious effort. Running this in 
packages/visualgst shows me that 93 out of 142 smalltalk source files directly 
reference or are at least aware of Gtk stuff. That's a lot of refactoring. As 
much as I would love to have something very high level for doing GUI work that 
felt completely native on every platform, it's a holy grail that wxWidgets, Qt 
and others have been chasing for a long time.

Now, binding to Cocoa itself should be relatively simple: Objective-C is 
semantically very similar to Smalltalk, except for the difficult parts where it 
accepts raw C types as arguments to messages. I know the VisualWorks guys 
produced a subclass of Namespace that loaded Obj-C libraries transparently.

I would say that the sensible way to proceed would be to fake it with a 
mostly-native look and feel using what Gtk has already built.