Editing HIDE (section)

=== The Windows question ===

ie "''will it run on Windows?''"

I don't see any reason why it shouldn't. All the basic parts we are using are cross-platform. Gtk2hs and hs-plugins run on Unix, Windows and Mac OS X.

That's not to say that every plugin will necessarily build on every platform. In fact we can use the plugin architecture to our advantage here to use different technologies to implement components on different platforms and to get better platform integration. For example consider the configuration subsystem; we might want to use GConf when using the Gnome platform but the Windows registery on Windows (or a simple file based implementaion on Windows and non-Gnome Unix platforms if people hate those sort of technologies).

However I don't expect that the plugability would extend to the basic graphical toolkit that is used. Though I do expect that many plugins would not need to be directly linked to a GUI toolkit if they do not need complicated user interaction.

BulatZiganshin: if using GTK will lead to need of installing additional software for Windows users of IDE, then it will be better to use wxWindows?

Piotr Kalinowski: I don't expect IDE to be such sort of software that you would frown at a single additional install of GTK libs. Would you?

Jeremy O'Donoghue: Agree that look and feel is not primary for IDE. However, wide acceptance will require that a Windows/Mac Installer be created, and this really needs to include all necessary libs to run.

For wxHaskell this is easy (2 DLLs in same directory as application, totalling ~4MB, and no registry entries needed). I've created several applications this way using Inno Setup - it's very easy to do.

For GTK it is harder - my Windows GTK directory contains 1850 files and 47MB (I assume similar problem for native Mac port - but I've never even tried: GTK was just too painful (and ugly) on Windows). You'll also need to create a few registry entries (HKLM/SOFTWARE/GTK/2.0/DllPath, Path and Version last time I looked).

It took me a week of part-time hacking to get a GTK+ developer install which worked, and I've never succeeded in packaging it into a single installer with a Windows app which reliably works. While GUI lib used for an IDE doesn't necessarily matter, packaging is a very big deal for a 'killer app' - it really does need to have a simple installation mechanism, so someone should look into this right from the start.

For me personally, I'd much prefer native look and feel on all platforms, but I'd live without it if HIDE was really a 'killer app'. However, failing to create a simple installation mechanism and/or hundreds of library dependencies mean that I'd probably never even try it to find out (life's too short).

Piotr Kalinowski: I suppose it is possible to use a separate installer for GTK+. How about the one from http://gladewin32.sourceforge.net ? There's runtime environment and development version. Personally I never had problems with GTK under windows at looks very well for me.