Re: GUI with Ada?

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Sat, 19 Dec 2009 02:01:13 -0800 (PST), Ludovic Brenta wrote:

> Nasser M. Abbasi wrote on comp.lang.ada:
>>
>> I have not kept up with Ada for sometime. I was wondering, if someone wants
>> to develop a simple GUI (plots, menus, buttons, graphs, etc..) using Ada,
>> and have the code compile to a .exe on windows and linux, which is the
>> current most popular software pieces needed for the GUI?
>>
>> Assuming I will be using GNAT. Which gcc version should I be using these
>> days which has the latest Ada support in it? Should I be using gcc directly
>> for Ada programming these days, or use GNAT GPL 2009 version from Libre web
>> sitehttp://libre.adacore.com/libre/?
>>
>> I know there are few choices for the GUI, and just wanted to check what is
>> the "best" choice do you think for that. �One with a GUI builder would be
>> nice (i.e. where one can pick the components and lay them out to design the
>> interface). This will be an school program, nothing commercial. I wanted to
>> try to write some basic finite element code in Ada, but need a GUI part for
>> the simulation part.
> 
> Shameless_Plug: begin

Not at all, you are doing a very important job. It takes too much time to 
download components from different sources, to combine them and to make 
them working. When you just want to try a new library out, you are lost.

BTW, the blame is all on non-Ada stuff. There was never any problem to 
incorporate an Ada library, because Ada has that excellent concept of 
compilation units. The problems begin when Ada is mere bindings to some 
other language mess with its dreadful makefiles and the horrific configure 
tool...

> Besides the respective merits of GTK+, Qt and their Ada bindings, you
> may find that ease of installation and deployment are also of
> importance.  By that metric, I suggest you take a look at Debian GNU/
> Linux 5.0 "Lenny", the stable distribution.  It ships GCC 4.3 and
> GtkAda 2.8.1 as packages, i.e. precompiled and preconfigured for
> immediate use, along with a host of other Ada libraries.  Beware
> though: you may get spoiled with the ease of use and never want to go
> back to Windows :)

Well, strange it might hear, but Windows API have their merits. One example 
specifically important to Ada, there is no any problem to send and receive 
Windows message from concurrent Ada tasks.

> The installation is as easy as:
> 
> aptitude install libgtkada2-dev
> 
> which will also pull the correct version of GCC and any other packages
> necessary.
> 
> If you feel adventurous, you may want to try the testing distribution;
> it has GtkAda 2.12.0.  I am planning to upload GtkAda 2.14.2 to
> unstable in the next couple of weeks; it should reach testing by the
> end of January.

Some information maybe interesting for you. I am using gtk 2.14.7 under 
Fedora Core 10, I am planing to jump over to the core 12 (since the core 11 
is broken). So far there is no problems, except for sporadic Storage_Error 
(caused by SIGSEGV). I am investigating the issue. Have you seen something 
alike?

Under Windows I go with gtk 2.14.5, which works perfectly well.

In both cases I didn't change anything in the GtkAda 2.14 itself, just 
recompiled it.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de