Making a GTK application in Haskell, part 1 (floreal.tech)

115 pointsby Vosporos8 hours ago25 comments

Koshkin 2 hours ago

Is a widget a monad? Anyway, the examples in this tutorial are another proof that Haskell is the best imperative language!

black_knight 41 minutes ago

It really is! The IO monad is basically a better C, if you know how to wield the FFI.

Vosporos 10 minutes ago

Widget is not quite a Monad, in this instance it's a newtype around a pointer and classes that mimic GTK's own class hierarchy.

seba_dos1 6 hours ago

Replace `backdrop-filter` on `.backdrop::after` with `filter` on `.backdrop picture` for a free scrolling performance boost.

nh2 5 hours ago

Indeed the scrolling performance is awful, makes reading it less enjoyable, especially when the topic is GUIs!

grimgrin 4 hours ago

desktop and mobile browsers have a reader mode icon you can click. it is useful for 1) this 2) website blocking fully loaded content with some paywall popup 3) and more!

click it for a better time

shevy-java 3 hours ago

Are people still using gtk?

I started to learn it back then via ruby-gtk2. It was not the best experience but I learned several key things pertaining to widgets and the UI. Then came gtk3; it was in some ways worse than GTK2, but it also brought a few improvements such as the partial CSS support. I always miss that when I use e. g. wxwidget.

Then came GTK4 though and things changed. Tons of old things broke or no longer worked. Simple things such as main_window_widget.move(0, 0) for top-left positioning (I added an alias to this, .top_left in ruby and that worked nicely); there are work-arounds to get the old behaviour, but this is just one example of so many more things that were eliminated. GTK4 is a GNOMEy-toolkit and GTK5 will be even worse since it will be wayland-only.

"Interacting" with the GNOMEy-GTK devs is a total waste of time and I am hardly the only one who had that experience. For GNOMEys it may be a useful platform, but GTK no longer is a general toolkit really, despite claims by the current GTK devs otherwise. Why would we non-GNOMEys want to keep GTK on life support? There really needs to be a toolkit that can work in a much more de-centralized way. Sadly I also don't have a good idea here, since funding is an issue and GUIs seem to have taken a huge hit ever since the world wide web became dominating.

GalaxyNova 2 hours ago

McCLIM is better

gen2brain 2 hours ago

Well, it is what was always considered to be a default toolkit. Sure, I like Qt and prefer such apps but you got a have the GTK installed anyway. It was always difficult to have general toolkit with it when you depend on dozens of dependencies, collection of libraries, not big fat libraries like in Qt, that you can deploy.

GTK4 changed a lot though, like they do not even try anymore, deprecated font dialog because that is better done with XDG portals, but such thing does not even exist. How will that work on macOS and Windows, it cannot? Or what they did with the menus. Toolkits should be user oriented and should not have vision, it just needs to work and provide controls, events, etc., you cannot even position windows in macOS and Windows with GTK4, that is not toolkit that works for users.

I am working on the IUP fork here https://github.com/gen2brain/iup-go , one toolkit to handle them all, and I did my best for GTK4 backend, but from 14 drivers/backends I worked on, it was the worst experience and I had to fight battles with it.

XorNot 2 hours ago

GTK3 has nice, conventional looking interfaces. Developing for it always felt insane, but the advent of AI has completely removed the friction so I've had Claude build me quite a few apps using it because I like the look and it's easy to navigate.

pluc 4 hours ago

> import GI.Awd qualified as Adw

please tell me that's a typo

tensegrist 4 hours ago

possibly enabled by lsp (Adw.foo -> "foo found in GI.Awd, import it with the name you used?")

pluc 4 hours ago

yeah seems to be a typo, it is "Adw" and not "Awd", phew

https://hackage.haskell.org/package/gi-adwaita

birchcove 6 hours ago

i've been writing Haskell GUIs for a few years and mostly stick to react-banana or reflex because wiring up gtk-gi signals manually gets messy fast. The Elm architecture pattern here looks clean on paper but I'm curious how you handle async events from the widget tree without ending up in callback hell. Did you end up wrapping all GI callbacks in a channel that feeds into your update loop?

freedomben 3 hours ago

Is Haskell in this case just binding a local HTTP port that users then hit with the browser? Or is it like a Tauri/Electron type of thing?

beanjuiceII 5 hours ago

bro takes 2 years to make a todo list

drnick1 5 hours ago

Just keep in mind that some people like me avoid Haskell and the huge package mess it causes on Linux. Pandoc is infamous for that. Just stick to C++.

Vosporos 5 hours ago

That is entirely your distribution's fault. ArchLinux has a user-hostile packaging approach which I do not experience in Fedora.

Ambolia 5 hours ago

I completely avoid any haskell package in Arch and just build it with Stack, it's usually simple.

klez 4 hours ago

What does Arch do in particular to cause a mess? It's been a hot minute since I last used it and surely didn't use pandoc back then.

spider-mario 3 hours ago

They build and link all Haskell libraries dynamically.

nimih 3 hours ago

Haskell packages in arch are dynamically, rather than statically, linked, which pulls in a large amount of transitive dependencies (reportedly in the neighborhood of a gigabyte). The maintainer has a pretty reasonable (to my eyes) explanation[1] as to why this is the case, but admittedly if I were an arch user I'd probably find it a bit annoying.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9emwtu/comment/e5qss...

ivanjermakov an hour ago

Arch Linux approach to python/haskell packaging is a great case study of what not to do...

kccqzy 4 hours ago

Does your distro not statically link Haskell libraries the way it’s meant to? Installing pandoc only requires libgmp.

black_knight 38 minutes ago

My Haskell experience on NixOS is wonderful!

I think it depends on your district. On some distros (looking at you arch!) I think GHCup and keeping things in /home and out of your system package manager is the better approach.

That said, I never had issues with Pandoc on any distribution. But I have struggled with Pandoc extensions, before I got NixOS (and flakes).