11:41 am, 21 Apr 04
logjam and gtk2.4
GTK 2.4 changes a bunch of APIs around again. It's (source+binary)backwards compatible, but they deprecated a bunch of widgets. I was poking around at it yesterday and I was writing code like this:
(Right here someone's gonna wanna comment and suggest [other language, probably C++] and I'm gonna laugh at you in advance.)
ag = gtk_action_group_new("MenuActions");
gtk_action_group_add_actions(ag, actions, G_N_ELEMENTS(actions), jw);
ui = gtk_ui_manager_new();
gtk_ui_manager_insert_action_group(ui, ag, 0);
gtk_window_add_accel_group(GTK_WINDOW(jw),
gtk_ui_manager_get_accel_group(ui));
if (!gtk_ui_manager_add_ui_from_string(ui, ui_desc, -1, &err)) {and then the awfulness of all of these function names and casts and never-ending revision hit me. I don't think I can deal with it anymore.(Right here someone's gonna wanna comment and suggest [other language, probably C++] and I'm gonna laugh at you in advance.)
Do you think GTK+ it's a bad place to start for GUI programming? I mainly worked with the tutorials and the docs and I got some things done, but ran up into huge roadblocks when I tried to expand upon a lot of the demos that I had code for.
This is not an attempt to start one of those "which is better, qt, gtk, or foo language" type things.
For some reason the language I always run to is Perl when I want to do things. I think that may be because it's easier to be lazy and not have structure.
I've never dealt with GTk, but after only a few projects I really hate dealing with the Win32 API. I like a lot of the ideas which GTk seems to be based on (although I might be wrong about some of them) but that code example you posted looks pretty ugly. Long function names galore. I like it a lot more than
SendMessage(hWnd, WM_SOMETHING, (WPARAM)something, (LPARAM) something)but it still doesn't look very pretty and looks like something I'd rather have a computer write for me.I wish I could recommend a GUI toolkit that doesn't suck, but so far as I've seen, they all do. Maybe this whole GUI idea is a wash.
But yeah, glade is nice.
Presumably, though, the XML output could be translated into C code? If noone's done that already I'd be very surprised.
I played with Glade a long time ago, but at the time I was only playing so I generated Perl from it. The Perl stuff required libraries galore too, sadly. (Beyond GTk itself, which obviously I accept when making a GTk app!)
(Then there's all the "_"s. I've never understood that about Unix coding conventions. What a fucking pain to type. :-P )
With the lots_of_underscores convention I have trouble seeing where identifiers begin and end (telling underscores apart from spaces.)