[Xcb] beginning

[Florent Monnier]

Hi Jamey,
thanks for the previous answers,

> Rather than using either Xlib or XCB, most programmers should probably
> be using toolkits such as Gtk+ or Qt.
I am a GTK user yet.
GTK is nice but I do not consider GUI libs such as GTK and Qt as the universal 
perfect answer for all kinds of softwares. For exemple I do love a lot the 
GUI of Blender. Unfortunatly it doesn't seems to be abstracted form the soft 
yet as a lib. (There's ghost but it seems to be only a replacement for glut, 
and perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems that ghost does not provide all the 
widgets used in the Blender's GUI.)

>                                       I don't recommend starting your
> studies of X with Xlib or XCB, because these libraries are very
> low-level, and difficult to use for normal applications.
There are cases where I think low level raw X is the answer
- when one do not want a conventional GUI like GTK and Qt are (: blender like)
- when one wish to make demos or screensavers
- when one wish to make a 2D game ?

(if I'm wrong with these cases, please tell me)

>                                                          However, if you
> eventually want to work with the raw X protocol, XCB is a much better
> choice than Xlib.

It seems much harder to install too  :p  ;-)
However, I would like to install it since I've started to try to make the very 
early alpha beginning of a binding of the xlib for OCaml,
http://www.linux-nantes.org/~fmonnier/OCaml/Xlib/doc/X.html
http://www.linux-nantes.org/~fmonnier/OCaml/Xlib/
OCaml is designed to be high level, efficient and _safe_, and the problem when 
mixing OCaml and C code is that the safety is compromised by the C part, and 
I've read that you work on the formally aspect with the XCB, which I guess a 
lot of OCaml users would appreciate.

I don't know if I will succeed the XCB install, so I have a question:
 what do you think would be the best choice, to bind the xlib for OCaml, or 
writing an X library in ocaml ?


++ Best Regards, Florent