What ISN'T good about PerlGTK?

swiftone has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm looking at writing a GUI interface to a program, and out of the available GUI options (Qt, Tk, and GTK), I found GTK to be the most appealing. It's portable, easy to use, quick to program (relatively), and has a clean license. I have no experience programming with it though, so before I get started and commit myself:

What is bad about PerlGTK? Why wouldn't I want to use it?

Comment on What ISN'T good about PerlGTK?

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Re: What ISN'T good about PerlGTK? by Anonymous Monk on May 30, 2000 at 22:47 UTC
PerlGTK is pretty cool, it's relatively easy to use if you know how to use it. Documentation is completely lacking. I would not try to program with it unless you've programmed with GTK+ in some form or another previously. Most things mimic the C calling sequece pretty well, such as `gtk_label_new("text");` [download] is `Gtk::Label->new("text");` [download] and so on. The bad part is when you get into some of the C calls that return things through the parameter list, i.e. a function that returns a value, but takes 2 pointers in its arguments which it sets to valuable information later. What is the way to mimic this call? Should it return a list of items that it normally would have assigned via pointers, or should it do something else? If it returns a list, then where are the gaps in the arguments, etc. A lot of figuring it out is hit and miss just trying things out. Alternatively, you can dig through the source code of the example programs that come with perlgtk. If you're comfortable with perl, perl objects, and modules, and you've programmed with gtk before, go for it. Otherwise, you might want to wait until some documentation is out and about.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: What ISN'T good about PerlGTK? by dusk (Friar) on Feb 21, 2001 at 11:39 UTC
Actually, there is some good documentation for PerlGTK. Check out http://personal.riverusers.com/~swilhelm/gtkperl-tutorial/	[reply]
Re: What ISN'T good about PerlGTK? by mdillon (Priest) on May 30, 2000 at 20:59 UTC
to quote Paolo Molaro, whom i believe to be the author of Perl/Gtk (in message <20000530173207.C15361@lettere.unipd.it> to perl-gtk-list@gnome.org): Well, I'd like to say that the module is feature complete so it doesn't need a lot of work:-) The reality is that some function is still missing here and there and I'd like to add support for some other libraries as well. The main issue, however, is documentation. i don't know enough yet myself to say anything useful first hand, but i'll be sure to post to Q&A when i figure it out.	[reply]
Re: What ISN'T good about PerlGTK? by dhable (Monk) on Nov 27, 2001 at 23:07 UTC
We write a majority of our GUI components in Perl. To distribute our applications, we need to produce a single executable file. When I tried to convert an application from PerlTk to PerlGTK, the perl interperter didn't have any problems with the new GUI library, but the compiler refused to compile the app. That's why we stick with PerlTK.	[reply]
Re: What ISN'T good about PerlGTK? by stefp (Vicar) on Mar 29, 2001 at 00:16 UTC
I would switch from perlTk to PerlGTK if the later had a decent text widget. My understanding is that the current one does not supports tags (a la perlTk) . On the other end the Canvas widget seems more powerful on PerlTk than in PerlGTK. It appeards that you can resize and rotate objects. Any first hand information? -- stef	[reply]

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