WxHaskell

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Wxhaskell-black-medium.png


What is it?

wxHaskell is a portable and native GUI library for Haskell. The goal of the project is to provide an industrial strength GUI library for Haskell, but without the burden of developing (and maintaining) one ourselves.

wxHaskell is therefore built on top of wxWidgets – a comprehensive C++ library that is portable across all major GUI platforms; including GTK, Windows, X11, and MacOS X. Furthermore, it is a mature library (in development since 1992) that supports a wide range of widgets with the native look-and-feel.

The current version of wxHaskell supports wxWidgets 3.2.

Status

The core interface of wxHaskell was originally derived from the 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 "exotic" widgets like dockable windows. The library supports Windows, GTK (Linux) and macOS X.

News

10 June 2024
wxHaskell is updated to work with new tools/dependencies versions. The source repository was moved to [1], and a release is coming soon.
28 April 2017
wxHaskell 0.92.3 is released.
30 December 2015
wxInstall Achelanne 0.1 and wxHaskell 0.92.2 are released.
9 October 2015
wxInstall Abriline packages and wxHaskell 0.92.1 are released.
27 August 2015
wxHaskell 0.92.0 is released.
12 August 2014
wxHaskell 0.91.0 is released. This version accepts wxWidgets 2.9 and 3.0.
21 March 2014
wxHaskell 0.90.1 is released.

See also Old wxHaskell news

Documentation

Resources

External links

See also