[R-gui] tcltk MDI, R-GUI speed

[Duncan Temple Lang]

James Wettenhall wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Jul 2004, Peng Liu wrote:
> > I will try your R-wxPython soon. The major concern is which is faster, R
> > -> rtcltk -> Tcl/Tk , or R -> RwxWindows -> RSPython -> wxPython, or it
> > does not matter?
> 
> Hi Peng,
> 
> "faster" ? If you are concerned about speed, then you should
> understand that both R-Tcl/Tk (already well developed) and
> R-wxPython (still in prototyping stage) both go via a scripting
> language (Tcl or Python) to get to the GUI toolkit, whereas it
> might be more efficient to somehow access the GUI toolkit
> directly (as is done in perl/Tk, i.e. perl does not use Tcl to
> communicate with Tk).  If you want to do this, it would take
> some hard work at the C programming level (low-level).
> 
> I'm sure a few people have tried this before and found it to
> be too difficult.

That is how the RGtk code works. There is no intermediate
scripting language.
It also isn't that hard as the routines in Gtk+
and any other Gtk+-based library (e.g. gnome,
gnomeprint, gtk+extra, gtkhtml, GGobi, etc.) are machine generated
based on a simple description of the library's facilities.
This allows the widget sets to be expanded by installing
individual widget collections. 

The same sort  of automated code generation could be done in wxWindows.
(There is a discussion about SWIG and other mechanisms to generate these
interfaces, and the RGtk mechanism is different again.)
The real question is what are people trying to do with these things.
For me, the motivation with RGtk is that Gtk is an important
toolkit used in many applications that I think we want to be able 
integrate R with.  Simuilarly, the RDCOM connections
(RDCOMClient and RDCOMServer and Thomas Baier's R DCOM) 
provides a mechanism for Windows.
And if you just want stand-alone applications in R,
then any toolkit is fine and Tk, eventhough it is old and not used
for many big applications, will work.



> 
> But if you could pull it off, it could mean that a large
> data frame in R could easily be displayed in a Tktable
> (spreadsheet) widget much faster than using the current
> mechanism (via Tcl).
> 
> Regards,
> James
> 
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-- 
Duncan Temple Lang                        duncan at wald.ucdavis.edu
 371, Kerr Hall
 University of California at Davis

Phone: (530) 752-4782
FAX:   (530) 752-7099


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