On Wednesday 16 January 2008 15:02:54 Dario Teixeira wrote:
> I'm inclined to agree.  I would even go as far as saying that the lack of
> Qt bindings is perhaps the biggest open sore as far as Ocaml library
> support is concerned.

As I understand it, OCaml's FFI makes writing Qt bindings an enormous 
undertaking which is why we don't have any.

I'm happy with GTK for now and would rather see OpenGL 2 bindings instead.

> The guys at Trolltech, however, seem quite keen on having Qt on as many
> platforms as possible (Qt-Jambi, which brings Qt to the JVM is one of their
> products).  Couldn't this whole auto-generation of bindings be made easier
> if they got involved?  I am sure they already have plenty of tools in
> place to facilitate it.  Even if they were not to commit actual manpower
> to the effort, they might still be able to help.

I found TrollTech's customer support awful as a customer so I very much doubt 
they will go out of their way to help a really obscure virgin corner of the 
Qt market. That was a few years ago though.

> And incidentally, the afore mentioned Qt-Jambi, together with the Ocamljava
> project might provide a last-resort solution in the absence of native
> bindings. Another possibility might be the Qyoto/Kimono project (which
> brings Qt/KDE into .net) together with the OcamlIL project (if it's still
> alive).  You would then use Mono to run Ocaml programmes.

I evaluated various such options recently and decided that Mono is truly awful 
(very poorly written, unreliable and slow) and LLVM is absolutely superb 
(extremely well-written C++ with complete native OCaml bindings!). Moreover, 
Mono appears to have no future in its current form whereas LLVM has serious 
backers and is improving at a tremendous rate.

Even if you don't want to implement a whole new language or backend, using 
LLVM's JIT compilation for code generation has great potential for OCaml, 
e.g. regexps. I highly recommend giving it a play!

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e