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

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 10/13/2009 12:05 AM, Eli Green wrote:
> It is not what I would call stable or even usable; a few windows that
> don't draw themselves, a lot of spinning beach balls (the "Window is not
> responding to events" indicator in OS  X).

It would be interesting to know if the X11 version has the same bugs, so 
as to pinpoint bugs or differences in GTK-Quartz.  It seems usable to me 
under both X11 and Window, and GTK-Quartz is the most experimental GTK 
backend.

> From what I can see,
> VisualGST is written directly against the Gtk libraries so it's not like
> somebody could simply implement a Cocoa version of Blox or equivalent.
> Has any thought been given to placing an abstraction library between GST
> and the native platform libraries or is GTK going to be the solution
> going forward?

Native-themed GTK, plus maybe a simple wrapper for the GTK-on-Mac 
libraries that fix the menu bar, is probably good enough.

Blox is good enough for simple things, but really implementing a 
complete modern UI class library is too much.  If I was starting from 
scratch, maybe it would make sense to reimplement Cocoa in Smalltalk, 
but that would be an incredible amount of work.  This is not to say Blox 
is bad---it used to be a small Xt wrapper and it has been made into a 
wrapper for Tk and (partly) GTK+, so it turned out to be way more 
flexible than it was meant to be.

Thanks for the build recipe!  I didn't think it would be difficult, just 
untested.  I had tested the various parts using the .pc files from 
gtk-osx.org, but I had never done a full build.  Can you put it in the 
wiki, or shall I?  Also, did you really need "--enable-gtk=yes"?  It 
should be done automatically.

Paolo