[lazarus] Widget sets

[Dan Damian]

Hi!

About the widget sets/drawing primitives issue...

GTK & Qt theme support would be great. GNOME & KDE session management &
desktop integration would also be great, though I'd love to be able to
write some apps that wouldn't require either GNOME or KDE, in a more
efficient way than writing 'em directly in Xlib/Xt.

Supporting all these 'trends' (Xlib, GTK/GNOME, Qt/KDE) would probably 
boost Lazarus' acceptance. Wrapping both GTK and Qt widgets shouldn't be a
big problem. But writing a Xlib-based component set is a totally different
approach, and I don't know how you could parallelize it with GTK/Qt
component development. That is, of course, if you still intend to wrap
widgets from other popular toolkits.

I'd sure like to have Lazarus compile Xlib apps as a primary target with
the option of creating GTK and Qt based apps, too (converting between
these platforms could be a neat feature). But if the Xlib based app will
have big disk & memory footprints (and if it wouldn't share memory with
other apps), I'd question my choice...

I know wrapping GTK (and Qt) widgets can be pretty nasty... But I'm not so
sure that writing another widget set is a good solution (even in objpas).
Duplicating the code makes apps bigger and (maybe) slower. AFAIK fpc
doesn't produce better (optimized) code than gcc/egcs (probably used by
the GTK & Qt teams). So I'd go with GTK and Qt widgets wrapping and GDK
and Qt drawing primitives for custom and abstract controls.

Anyway, my opinion is that FCL should be written along with the
Lazarus IDE. It's nonsense to first create the IDE and then the class
library...


-dan