[cmake-developers] Future of ccmake and cmake-gui and internationalization

[Clifford Yapp]

On Thu, Aug 17, 2017 at 2:27 AM, Eric Wing <ewmailing at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi Eric:
>>
>> My opinion is your point about size is weak because IUP normally depends on
>> a big suite of graphical libraries in the GTK+ case or a big set of
>> system libraries such as GDI/GDI+/Uniscribe or Direct2D/DirectWrite in
>> the Windows case.
>
> On systems the provide first class native GUIs, I would disagree with
> this point because the system libraries are typically already loaded
> by everything. Furthermore, even non-native frameworks like Qt need to
> link into the native frameworks even though they may not be using much
> from it. So you take a double hit because you get both the system
> frameworks and the non-native implementation. This is very apparent on
> Mac, where everything links to Foundation and AppKit as a baseline.
>
> I do cede that GTK is not small. However, almost all the distros I see
> today ship at least GTK2, with a lot of forks UI forks in protest of
> GTK3 and Gnome, and intentionally kept GTK2 alive because it was much
> smaller than GTK3. So there is probably something already on your
> system using it. But if you really need something smaller, Motif is
> always an option. (Also, somebody is experimenting with my Cocoa
> backend and has a prototype working in GNUStep on Linux though I
> wouldn't necessarily consider that small either and few systems
> install it.)

If small and self-reliant are the criteria, how does FLTK
(http://www.fltk.org/index.php) stack up?  For something like
cmake-gui it would probably work just fine, and AFAIK it doesn't
require GTK...  it uses LGPLv2 with a static linking exception, so
it's probably as good/better than the current Qt requirement in that
department.