will shoes support GTK on windows? can we use all ruby-gnome2 APIs in shoes?

Question

I know neither is true for now, but I really want these to be true. I heard that ruby-gnome2 and shoes are the top most used desktop libraries for ruby. since shoes and gtk depends on some common things, and shoes give a higher abstraction for UI, why not go a step further to merge them? make shoes totally on top of GTK.

I respect different intent of shoes' creators, so, just a question to make me clear.

Thanks very much for your great job!

Answer 1

I obviously can't speak for _Why (author of shoes) but his stated goals are very divorced from GTK. Shoes was written to be very small, and derives a lot of its formatting and functionality from the web. GTK is huge (and very useful, but not at all shoes-ish).

_Why has written shoes mostly on top of Cairo, which is what recent versions of GTK use for widget drawing also, so it appears he purposely stepped back to the core of UI design and created a different framework from the ground up for a solidly different reason than one would use GTK for. He's posted before on the why shoes is not Tk/wX/etc., but I can't find it just now to link it.