Re: Would there be a drawback of using the same graphical toolkit on every platform?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>
> Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2022 14:46:30 +0100
> Cc: emacsq <laszlomail@protonmail.com>,
>  emacsq via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor
>  <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
> 
> Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> writes:
> 
> >> https://m.facebook.com/nt/screen/?params=%7B%22note_id%22%3A10107017870677858%7D&path=%2Fnotes%2Fnote%2F&refsrc=deprecated&_rdr
> >
> > That article is misleading.
> 
> Is it?

You should listen to Po Lu: he knows what he's talking about.

> > The GLib (GTK) event loop is the least of our problems, which is handled
> > very well with a small amount of code in xgselect.c.  That toolkit has
> > its own ideas of how not to listen to the programmer which makes it very
> > annoying to deal with (i.e. in both the X and PGTK builds, it keeps
> > fighting with Emacs over the size of frames, and it's the only build
> > where `scroll-bar-width' doesn't work.)
> >
> > It also has various bugs in features the developers deem uncommon, such
> > as crashing when a display connection is closed.
> 
> Several entire desktops and countless applications implemented with Gtk
> for different OS:s certainly speak in favor of your arguments.
> 
> Cetainly it must be problem to Gtk and someone elses incompetence, can't be
> that Emacs is using it in a manner it wasn't supposed to be used.

How many "other applications" using GTK support dynamic menus and
allow users to create their own menus?  How many "other applications"
using GTK support user-level threads?  How many of them let user code
control the display to a degree that Emacs does?

Yes, Emacs stands out, because it does all of those, and more.

> You can either do as you do and consider a framework design to be a bug
> because it does not fit into your wishful expectations, or you can recognize
> that the design does not fit a particular application in this case Emacs. 
> There
> is nothing wrong with that, none framework is required to fit each and every 
> use
> case in existence. Emacs uses Gtk in a way it is not supposed to and that
> creates some friction. I don't understand why you need to blame that on Gtk? I
> am not even very fond of Gtk myself, but there is no reason to be unfair.

You never tried to futz with the GTK code in Emacs, did you?  It is a
collective experience of several generations of Emacs developers that
GTK uses some techniques that make Emacs's life very difficult.  This
is not about assigning blame, nor about fairness, this is just the
facts of life.  So please understand us when we very much hope a
toolkit emerges that is more "friendly" to Emacs than GTK.