DUIM - Dylan User Interface Manager

We have a lot to learn about hacking on DUIM, so there isn’t much to document yet as we haven’t learned yet.

GTK Back-end

The GTK+ back-end is usable on both macOS and Linux. It is based on GTK+ 3.x. On macOS, it assumes that the Quartz back-end is being used rather than X11.

The bindings for GTK+ are largely generated from gobject-introspection meta-data. Some portions are hand-edited however or entirely done by hand, like the Cairo bindings. Most of the special cases for hand-editing are put into the binding generator (gir-dylan), but not all.

Getting GTK+ 3.x with Quartz on macOS

Building GTK+ 3.x with Quartz on macOS must be done in a specific way. This currently can not be done with Homebrew.

Follow the directions on the GTK+ wiki, but make sure to build GTK+ 3.x rather than 2.x. To do this, you’ll want to use the moduleset meta-gtk-osx-gtk3 rather than meta-gtk-osx-core.

Once you have a build, be sure to add the appropriate directories to your path.

We have not yet integrated GTK+’s macOS integration module, so the menu bar will not (yet) be integrated with the system menu bar when running a DUIM application.

Note

GTK+ will be built as a 64 bit binary. This means that your Dylan code will also have to be built as a 64 bit binary. Doing this requires a build of Open Dylan from the master branch. Once you have a current build of Open Dylan, set the OPEN_DYLAN_TARGET_PLATFORM environment variable to x86_64-darwin and your builds will be 64 bit.

Debugging Information

To enable more debugging information, uncomment the following line in sources/duim/gtk/gtk-debug.dylan:

*debug-duim-function* := dbg;

You can then output debugging information with either of the following functions:

• ignoring(msg)

• duim-debug-message(format, args)

Additional debug information can be obtained via the GTK_DEBUG and GDK_DEBUG environment variables.