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gi-gtk-declarative

Declarative GTK+ programming in Haskell

Using declarative markup to construct user interfaces, in a purely functional fashion, is a great joy. Instead of imperatively building up stateful objects in IO, you construct a regular data structure describing the user interface to render.

In web development, declarative user interfaces are supported not only by HTML and related standards, but more recently also by "virtual DOM" technologies, as found in React and Elm. Web technologies have then spread to desktop applications through embedded web views, enabled by technologies like Electron.

But what about regular (non-web) GUI frameworks for desktop, like GTK+? We should be able to benefit from the declarative programming model, stealing ideas from virtual DOM implementations and web front end frameworks, while using the battle-tested native GUI technologies on the desktop.

This is the goal of gi-gtk-declarative; a declarative and purely functional programming model for GTK+ user interfaces. The library aims to extend the haskell-gi family of packages as transparently as possible, not having to reimplement or manually wrap large parts of existing GTK+ widgets.

Get started by checking out the installation instructions!