Re: GUI Toolkit

[Gard Spreemann <gspr@nonempty.org>]

On Sat, Nov 22, 2014 at 11:00:34AM +0100, Dirk Hünniger wrote:
> Hi,
> I am looking for a GUI Toolkit for Haskell, I would like to
> distribute my application on Debian and also publish it as a
> portable application on windows (that means it just runs as soon as
> you extracted the zip file into a folder and double click the exe).
> Currently I have my application written in Haskell and use Python 3
> and QT 4 for the GUI and do the interfacing via the command line.
> This works quite well and fulfills the above requirements. Still I
> would prefer to do everything in Haskell only. I found that a
> Haskell gtk interface packaged with Debian. But as far as I could
> find out it is extremely difficult to write a portable application
> for windows with gtk. I didn't find bindings for QT in Debian.

Hi,

While not really a Haskell binding to Qt per se, HsQML [1,2] does offer a nice
compromise until the time when such a thing is available. With HsQML, you write
the GUI in QML [3] (a declarative language which is, from what I can tell, the
preferred way of writing Qt applications these days anyway) but the application
is Haskell-driven.

It has some unpolished edges still, but I think it's worth considering, at
least until someone comes up with a Qt-backed FRP GUI system (this seems a
long way off).

(I have HsQML packaged at [4], but I've only tested it with Ubuntu).

-- Gard

[1] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hsqml
[2] http://www.gekkou.co.uk/software/hsqml/
[3] http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5/qmlapplications.html
[4] https://launchpad.net/~gspreemann/+archive/ubuntu/haskell