[Mono-list] gtk# or fox#

[cryst]

I'm sending this to both the mono (linux .net) and the fox lists, since
there is questions for both lists in here.

I've been playing with the fox-toolkit for a few weeks.
http://www.fox-toolkit.org/fox.html It is a C++ cross platform library.  On
the list someone has successfully made interfaces to C# and has been able to
compile .net forms with it. http://fxnet.berlios.de/

The thing is, I believe that a lot of work can be avoided if  mono uses
something like this as our forms layer. The reason I think this, is that the
fox toolkit only uses low level api's to do the drawing. So instead of
expecting the current OS to draw a button, it tells the current OS to draw a
few lines and fill them in to look like a button. (just an example, the
actual details are different). This means that instead of supporting
multiple versions of gtk with different platform support issues, we support
one, and get the same look across platforms. It also means less to support
(since there are fewer api calls). Fox was designed from the bottom up to
work across platforms, so presumably there should be less work in making it
platform specific to mono.

To the mono guys:
I don't think making interfaces to C# is the way to go though. It would be
better to use a managed interface to C++, so all the code will work as is,
(with future fixes as well). Is this currently possible in Mono?

To the fox guys:
This library uses ifdef's to compile for various operating systems. If we
add mono as a new platform and ifdef the managed parts to call mono instead
of the current system would this work?

This seems very obvious to me, so it is surprising that it hasn't come up
before. Therefore I expect I'm somewhere out in left field. Please feel free
to correct me :)

Chris Bruner