[wxhaskell-devel] The future of wxC

[Jeremy O'D. <jer...@gm...>]

Hi lists,

There have been a number of discussions over the past week or so on the
future of wxC. I'm not as good as Dave at cross-referencing everything, but
at the very least we have:

http://www.mail-archive.com/wxh...@li.../msg01050.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/wxh...@li.../msg00735.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/wxh...@li.../msg00736.html
http://wewantarock.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/who-is-my-community/
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/oek2t/any_interest_in_a_c_binding_to_wxwidgets_from/

What I have tried to do is to raise the option of making wxC a separate
project to other groups (Dave and Eric have reached out to a couple of
other comunities as well), and see whether there is much interest out there.

The most concrete interest has come from the D community, which lacks a
good GUI binding, and which (it seems to me, based entirely on blog noise)
is growing pretty rapidly, with some more vague interest coming from the
wxWidgets community more generally (and granted that I have not done much
to reach out in that direction).

I must say that I am at least somewhat convinced that there is demand for
wxC 'out there', and it is therefore worth making an initial effort to make
wxC a viable option for other language communities.

With this in mind, I would like to suggest a staged approach - comments and
opinions are very welcome.


   1. The first stage is to simply get wxHaskell with 2.9.x support out of
   the door. I don't think we should change anything at this stage, other than
   that it definitely makes more sense to use wx-config-win on Windows
   platforms if we are going to work with others.
   2. The second stage is to spin wxC off as a separate project.
      1. Eric will probably kill me for saying this, but I think GitHub is
      probably the right place, possibly keeping Sourceforge as the project
      website and distribution point (I personally don't much like git, but it
      has mindshare, and probably makes more sense than Darcs for a non-Haskell
      project - plus my experience with patch-tag and darcsden has been that
      'getting going' on a Windows machine is far from trivial). I could be
      persuaded to change my mind on this one, but probably only if one of the
      Darcs hosts can get the experience 'right' on Windows clients.
      2. Keep the Cabal-based build system to start with, until there is
      clear evidence of non-Haskell contributions.
   3. If wxC turns out to have legs, the main areas to attack should be:
      1. Move to bakefile based build.
      2. Automated generation of the binding.

I must say that comments to the blog posting in particular were really
quite encouraging, but I don't waht to put the cart before the horse. In
particular, Gour (an ex-Haskeller) and Andrej seem keen to try out what we
have already with D, which would make an excellent proof of concept.

Once we've had some discussion (say around the middle of the week), I'd
like to blog on what we propose to do, and start to reach out a bit further
to other groups.

Regards
Jeremy