RE: wxLua on OS X?

["Vijay Aswadhati" <wyseman@...>]

I have used wxWindows extensively and I know that it supports OS X and
hence porting wxLua "should" be possible with a minimum effort.

However, I share your sentiments about wxWindows having become "fat"; on the
other hand it does provide everything one needs to develop viable commercial
applications.

I have been searching for a long time in trying to marry a good light weight
and yet rich GUI toolkit with Lua. This search has become an obsession of
mine so to say.

What I am looking for is a toolkit that is totally devoted to GUI and
nothing else. For example no sockets, no threading and synchronization
facilities.

Further the authors of such a toolkit should stand firm on keeping the
toolkit stand alone with no strings attached and strongly disallow cross
domain features.

I have looked at TkLua, wxLua, Lua FLTK, Lui and IUP; none of the current
solutions satisfy the requirements I have (in my mind).

On the wild side, I have been spending some time investigating at potential
candidates that meet the requirements at least from what I have read about
them. These are in no particular order:
	-- The fox toolkit <http://www.fox-toolkit.org>
	-- Java SWT from eclipse project
<http://www.eclipse.org/articles/index.html>

These toolkits are light (make direct OS calls with minimum abstraction and
layers), small in size, and take the approach that the toolkit should remain
standalone with absolutely no other dependencies for some one to use it.

However there is no gaurantee that they will remain so. For example the
author of fox toolkit is currently investigating on how to provide a
HTML browser widget and I am sure any implementation would lead to adding
socket support to the library thus making even this toolkit a bit "fat".

An ideal marriage would be to find a toolkit that provides absolutely
bare minimum of GUI abstractions and platform portability and the rest
gets built using Lua itself. That is why I am leaning towards porting
SWT to Lua, since only the very low level widget code is written
in "C" and the rest is written using Java. The trouble is that I am
still learning Lua and this is not a trivial excercise. And I do not
want to use "toLua" since that again introduces a dependency.

Just airing my thoughts to get some feedback from the Lua community.


-- Vijay Aswadhati






-----Original Message-----
From: lua-bounces@bazar2.conectiva.com.br
[mailto:lua-bounces@bazar2.conectiva.com.br]On Behalf Of Chris Perkins
Sent: Saturday, August 02, 2003 7:51 PM
To: lua@bazar2.conectiva.com.br
Subject: wxLua on OS X?


Has anyone ported wxLua over to OS X?

It seems do-able, since both Lua and wxWindows are available on OS X.   But,
has anyone done it and have some advice? A sample CodeWarrior project file?


Or alternatively, does anyone have a good recommendation on an OS X cum
Windows GUI library?  wxWindows has gotten "fat" in its old age.  I'd really
prefer something lighter.  Of course, many of the lighter libraries I see
don't have a very good selection of widgets. Ideally I'd like support for
scrolling panels, tables, lists, and tree controls, and forego
application/document metasystems.

Thanks,

Chris Perkins
Media Lab, Inc.