Editing WxHaskell (section)

== Status ==

The core interface of wxHaskell was originally derived from the [http://elj.sourceforge.net/projects/gui/ewxw/ wxEiffel] binding. Work on this has been dormant for several years, but the wxHaskell maintainers now support updates to the wxWidgets API themselves.

There are four key components of wxHaskell from version 0.90 onwards (three in earlier branches).
* wxdirect parses specially written C headers and generates low level Haskell FFI bindings for the exported functions.
* wxc is a C language binding for wxWidgets. It is needed because the Haskell FFI can only bind to C as it does not understand C++ name mangling. Because it is a C language wrapper over wxWidgets, and is generated as a standard dynamic library on all supported platforms, wxc could be used as the basis for a wxWidgets wrapper for any language which supports linking to C (so that would be all of them then). In older versions of wxHaskell, the wxc components were built as a monolithic static library with wxcore.
* wxcore is a set of low-level Haskell bindings to wxc. A large part is generated automatically by wxdirect, with some key abstractions being hand-coded in Haskell. You can program directly to the wxcore interface if you wish (it is sometimes the only way, in fact).
* wx is a set of higher-level wrappers over wxcore. It is intended to make it easier to write reasonably idiomatic Haskell. Most wxHaskell software is about 80% wx and 20% wxcore.

The C wrapper is, unfortunately, generated by hand, so there is some (mainly tedious boilerplate) work involved in porting a new set of widgets to wxHaskell. Some work has been done into automating this aspect, but we are far from being able to replicate the approach reliably over then entire API as yet.

From the perspective of the user (rather than the developer) about 90% of the core wxWidgets functionality is already supported, excluding more &quot;exotic&quot; widgets like dockable windows. The library supports Windows, GTK (Linux) and macOS X.