Re: Touchscreen support

[Po Lu]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> That sounds like a big problem, but it is described in a very abstract
> way.  Can you present a concrete exanple of such a difference in
> abstractions?

For example, programs in GTK+ aren't supposed to create windows or
widgets manually anymore.  Instead, GTK provides a system to create
"applications", which run in the background and respond to requests to
open files or to display a default window, and it also provides an
XML-based format for describing the layout of widgets and windows.

In GTK 4, menus cannot even be modified by applications on-the-fly
anymore.  You are again supposed to use a GTK-specific XML format to
describe the menus of your application in a way that cannot be changed
at run-time.

What used to be a few ifdefs (and some code) away now requires you to
write a different XML file for each toolkit, and to redesign your
application to fit various unnecessary limitations imposed by the
toolkit developers.

> Would it be possible to invent a higher-level abstraction to unify
> these toolkits?

I'm not sure.