I started learning Standard ML recently out of curiosity. So what I know is that is has an efficient compiler (MLton) which allows us to freely use abstractions without worrying about performance.
It would be perfect if I could do some GUI programming with Standard ML, too. Is there anything like Gtk, Qt, or WxWidgets binding for Standard ML?
Thank you very much.
Here's a paper describing the mGTK project, which is a Standard ML binding to GTK. There are also a couple of interfaces to OpenGL, although this is more 2 and 3D graphics-oriented rather than specifically a GUI toolkit. eXene is a toolkit for X Windows. sml_tk is an interface to Tk.
There are bindings for foreign toolkits, but the eXene toolkit was designed to be native for SML and to exploit the features of Concurrent ML. I used it years ago and found it a very smooth fit for the language and a pleasure to use. But it does not have the ginormous library of components that you find in the more widely used toolkits.
Giraffe Library provides SML bindings to libraries that support GObject Introspection, which includes GTK. At the time of writing, bindings are available for the GTK 3 stack. Although the cairo graphics library does not support GObject Introspection, Giraffe Library provides bindings to some cairo functions.
Although SML has a very precise definition, the definition does not include an FFI, and there is considerable variation between compilers. At the time of writing, Giraffe Library supports only the FFIs of MLton and Poly/ML.
