KiWi

03/06/2016

I’ve released my first CHICKEN egg today! It’s part of my thesis on GUI programming approaches and will certainly not be the last one in my series of new GUI library wrappers.

I actually expected to release my giflib egg first, but that went way worse due to deficiencies in the documentation and one very puzzling bug in the official library interface nobody else than me appears to be using. As it got fixed only recently[1], I might pick up work on that soonish.

kiwi itself is pretty close, but not too close to the KiWi library. After learning how it works, I wrote bindings to nearly all identifiers, save the ones that weren’t worth the trouble[2], then added a bit of sugar for the most tedious parts of the examples. Along the way I’ve handed in over a dozen issues and a few PRs, nearly all of which were handled quickly. Therefore, even if you’re not too keen on working with an in-progress library, upstream has always been helpful and a pleasure to work with.

The other side effect was that I learned to use gdb for debugging segfaults, have a much clearer idea just what exactly writing good wrappers involves and am now in the know how exactly the egg release process works. It is much more than just generating the wrapper code to achieve something that feels rather like Scheme than C. One example of this is the rather peculiar use of stack-allocated structs for specifying coordinates and dimensions of widgets which doesn’t translate well to programming languages that use heap-allocation for nearly all objects. I did initially use malloc(3) to get heap-allocated and free(3) with a finalizer to free it after a GC. This was a pretty bad idea as it did trigger GCs when playing around with the drag and drop example, so after much experimentation, I rewrote nearly all functions involving these structs to take their values, create a stack-allocated struct and use its address in the respective function, which pretty much mirrors the code style used in the examples.

I’d love hearing back from you if you happen to use CHICKEN as well and have a need for widgets in your SDL2 application. If not, stay tuned for my other upcoming bindings to nuklear and libui!