GTK++, stability, and the uncluttered future

Posted Aug 15, 2013 7:13 UTC (Thu) by zenaan (guest, #3778)
Parent article: GTK++, stability, and the uncluttered future

> Ultimately, though, Bassi does think that GTK+ needs to start adding a scene graph library
..
> The scene graph is important because GTK+'s current drawing functions make it difficult to tell what element the cursor is over at any moment. Making each GTK+ widget a Clutter-based actor would make that determination trivial, and provide other features like making widgets CSS-themable

Welll ...
"Evas is a clean display canvas API that implements a scene graph," see
http://trac.enlightenment.org/e/wiki/Evas

Back in the day Rasterman/Carsten implemented some GTK+ theme engines and more. E libs such as Evas really were way ahead of their time. Now perhaps some can see that Gnome is _still_ trying to catch up. That's how it looks to me anyway.

Gesture support?

Scalable/dynamic, declarative UIs?

Multiple platforms?

Clean architecture, comprehensive and well thought out library layers ... the list goes on and on.

There was even a time in my memory when it looked like it might be possible that Gnome and E might merge.

Anyway, I think it might greatly behoove Gnome/GTK+ developers to take another look at the Enlightenment libs. Really, a lot of ground has been thoroughly trod over in the E camp.

I would very much appreciate any feedback here on LWN re E libs etc.

GTK++, stability, and the uncluttered future

Posted Aug 15, 2013 10:51 UTC (Thu) by zenaan (guest, #3778) [Link]

For future reference, and for those wishing to research, I just added the "Scene graphs in user interfaces" section which is primarily a list of various canvas libraries, to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scene_graph

GTK++, stability, and the uncluttered future

Posted Aug 15, 2013 11:34 UTC (Thu) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link]

Now perhaps some can see that Gnome is _still_ trying to catch up.

GNOME and GTK haven't been "catching up" to EFL. it's actually pretty much the other way around, and to be fair, it's going to be a long time before the EFL set of bajillion libraries can compete in terms of design, engineering practices, and implementation, with the libraries in the GNOME platform.

I think you missed the point that Clutter has been available and used for 7 years; all this time, it has been integrated with the GNOME platform. in order for Clutter and GTK to get better, and get more features and users, they need to merge. Clutter has to turn into something at the very core of the platform diagram, not as something that you can opt in.

GTK++, stability, and the uncluttered future

Posted Aug 15, 2013 15:58 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

> E libs such as Evas really were way ahead of their time.

Hard to believe that when the E17 project has been around for longer then GTK2 and yet has a tiny fraction of the useful applications of GTK3.

I suppose it's the same sort of thing people bring up with Resier4 vs Btrfs as "being ahead of it's time".

GTK++, stability, and the uncluttered future

Posted Aug 17, 2013 9:20 UTC (Sat) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link]

What does that have to do with anything? Things that are ahead of their time are often cannibalized by their more-popular siblings and left to die. Many of the languages of the 1960s were way ahead of Fortran and Cobol; not one of them is still used, while Fortran lives, with object orientation no less. (If you don't count C, at best a language of the tail end of the 1960s.)