Re: Abysmal state of GTK build

[Po Lu]

Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support> writes:

> Here is C++ toolkit that is fast and slick for consideration.
>
> FLTK - Wikipedia
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLTK

Just because we can use C++ in optional GUI code doesn't mean it
shouldn't be avoided if it can.

But after some investigation, I've come to the conclusion that no
toolkit will be able to replace the hand-crafted Emacs X11 support,
especially in very tricky areas such as drag-and-drop and selections.

For example, Qt doesn't respect kDNDStatusSendHereFlag in XDND
drag-and-drop messages, fails to wait for XdndStatus before sending
XdndPosition/XdndDrop, and provides no method for programs to set it on
their drop targets.  It also doesn't support the X Direct Save protocol,
which can't be implemented on top, since the special action required for
it is abstracted away and not available to programs using Emacs, or the
the Motif and OffiX drag-and-drop protocols.  All of that is tolerated
by other programs but will lead to problems over slow network
connections.

And it probably won't be possible to step through a selection converter
with Edebug, or to install our own selection converter when Qt
misencodes COMPOUND_TEXT.