gui toolkits: the real story? (Tkinter, PyGTK, etc.)

[Chris Mellon]

On 10/3/07, Grant Edwards <grante at visi.com> wrote:
> On 2007-10-03, Chris Mellon <arkanes at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 10/2/07, Grant Edwards <grante at visi.com> wrote:
> >> On 2007-10-02, Chris Mellon <arkanes at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> > PyGtk has poor cross platform support, a very large footprint (the
> >> > largest of all these libraries)
> >>
> >> It's larger than wxWidgets on top of Gtk?
> >
> > No, but it's larger than wx on top of the native API,
>
> A moot point for X11.

wxWidgets actually does have a raw X11 implementation, although nobody
uses it so it's not well maintained. And since X11 is hardly the only
platform that anyone cares about, evaluating a potential addition to
the standard library across *all* platforms is important.

>
> > so when you average it across all platforms it's quite a bit
> > larger.
>
> I guess that's one of the costs of portability.
>

Eh? The point is that wxWidgets, the more portable toolkit, is
*smaller* than Gtk. It's not really related to portability as much as
design considerations. Gtk is designed and intended to be used as a
system library, in conjunction with many other system libraries and
lots of system-level configuration. It was never written with the goal
of being an application-level toolkit.