[Mono-list] Why GTK#?

Dominik Fretz lists@roboto.ch
Wed, 23 Apr 2003 10:36:26 +0200


Maurizio Colucci wrote:
> Hi,
> 
[snip]
> 
> PS: I am looking forward to see SharpDevelop run on linux (without
> wine). When will this happen?

Hi Maurizio!

Currntely the Developpers of #D are completing the 0.95 release which
will still be a Windows version. But they claim that this will be the
last System.Windows.Forms based #D.
After the 0.95 is released, it seams that they working for complete the
SWT port of #D.
SWT is a GUI Library portet from Java. Its benefits are that it uses
native widgets. On widows, its uses Windows GUI elements and on Linux it
uses GTK (there is also a Coco implementation and others, but these are
currently not portet to c#).
Mike (one of the main developper of #D) has portet the whole win32 stuff
of SWT and the platform indipendend part and has done some work in
porting #D to SWT but it's not complete currently.

Pedro Abelleira Seco and I are on the way of porting the GTK part of the
SWT library to C# and the most work is done here. The main thing that's
not portet currently is D'n'D, but I'm not sure if Mike has portet it in
the win32 version either.
The other thing is the HTML (swt)widget witch was not part of SWT. Mike
deveopt one (a wrapper for IE) on windows, and i started to get mozilla
with GtkMozEmbed running.

As information: We don't use GTK# (and i think Mike isn't using S.W.F on
win32) for the port. We try to be as close to the original java source
as possible and so we used (like java) direct calls to the native libs.
This is done per PInvoke to the gtk libs and (for some parts) a smal
glue library.

I don't know how long it will take to integrate the #D source with our
GTK-SWT version. In spite of our goal to be close to Java, i think there
will be some problems itegrating the two parts.


Regards
Dominik