- ocaml >= 4.05.0
- gtk+ >= 3.18
- dune >= 1.4
LablGtk3 is still an experimental port of LablGtk2 to Gtk-3. Currently it is more or less a subset of LablGtk2.
An important change in gtk-2 was the use of unicode (utf8) for
all strings. If you use non-ascii strings, you must imperatively
convert them to unicode. This can be done with the
Glib.Convert.locale_to_utf8
function. If your input is already in
utf8, it is still a good idea to validate it with
Glib.Utf8.validate
, as malformed utf8 strings may cause segmentation
faults.
Note that setlocale
is now always called (except if you set
GTK_SETLOCALE
to 0 in the environment), but LC_NUMERIC
is reverted
to "C"
to avoid problems with floating point conversion in OCaml.
Some widgets may be unsupported on your version of Gtk. If you use them, you will get a runtime error:
Failure "Gobject.unsafe_create : type GtkActionGroup is not yet defined"
For unsupported methods, the error message is a bit clearer:
Failure "gdk_pixbuf_get_file_info unsupported in Gtk 2.x < 2.4"
Type
dune build
to compile with all supported options enabled (libgl, libgnomecanvas, librsvg, native compilation, thread support).
You can build individual packages using
dune build $package.install
The following packages / libraries are provided:
lablgtk3
lablgtk3-sourceview3
lablgtk3-gtkspell3
gdk.ml
low-level interface to the General Drawing Kitgtk.ml
low-level interface to the GIMP Tool KitgtkThread.ml
main loop for threaded versiong[A-Z]*.ml
object-oriented interface to GTKgdkObj.ml
object-oriented interface to GDKlablgtk3
toplevelexamples/*.ml
various examplesapplications/browser
an ongoing port of ocamlbrowserapplications/camlirc
an IRC client (by Nobuaki Yoshida)
The examples are compiled by calling dune build @all
, you can build
lablgtk3
applications using a standard dune / ocamlfind workflow.
The lablgtk3 script loads an extra module GtkInit, whose only contents is:
let locale = GtkMain.Main.init ()
You must either add this line, or add this module to your link, before calling any Gtk function. With ocamlfind, use
ocamlfind ocamlc -package lablgtk3.auto-init -linkpkg -w s ???.ml -o ???
Otherwise, use something similar to:
ocamlc -I +lablgtk3 -w s lablgtk.cma gtkInit.cmo ???.ml -o ???
Failing to add this init line will result in the following runtime error
(process:19985): Gtk-CRITICAL **: 20:09:13.764: _gtk_style_provider_private_get_settings: assertion 'GTK_IS_STYLE_PROVIDER_PRIVATE (provider)' failed
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
% lablgtk3 -thread
Objective Caml version 4.07.1
# let w = GWindow.window ~show:true ();;
# let b = GButton.button ~packing:w#add ~label:"Hello!" ();;
You should at once see a window appear, and then a button. The GTK main loop is running in a separate thread. Any command is immediately reflected by the system. For Windows and OSX/Quartz, there are restrictions on which commands can be used in which thread. See the windows port section lower for how to use them.
When using threads in a stand-alone application, you must link with gtkThread.cmo and call GtkThread.main in place of GMain.main.
Since 2.16.0, busy waiting is no longer necessary with systems threads. (I.e., CPU usage is 0% if nothing occurs.) If you use VM threads, you have to enable busy waiting by hand, otherwise other threads won't be executed (cf. gtkThread.mli). Beware that with VM threads, you cannot switch threads within a callback. The only thread related command you may use in a callback is Thread.create. Calling blocking operations may cause deadlocks. On the other hand, all newly created threads will be run outside of the callback, so they can use all thread operations.
These modules are composed of one submodule for each class. Signals specific to a widget are in a Signals inner module. A setter function is defined to give access to set_param functions.
These modules provide classes to wrap the raw function calls. Here are the widget classes contained in each module:
- GPango Pango font handling
- GDraw Gdk pixmaps, etc...
- GObj gtkobj, widget, style
- GData data, adjustment, tooltips
- GContainer container, item_container
- GWindow window, dialog, color_selection_dialog, file_selection, plug
- GPack box, button_box, table, fixed, layout, packer, paned, notebook
- GBin scrolled_window, event_box, handle_box, frame, aspect_frame, viewport, socket
- GButton button, toggle_button, check_button, radio_button, toolbar
- GMenu menu_item, tearoff_item, check_menu_item, radio_menu_item, menu_shell, menu, option_menu, menu_bar, factory
- GMisc separator, statusbar, calendar, drawing_area, misc, arrow, image, pixmap, label, tips_query, color_selection, font_selection
- GTree tree_item, tree, view (also tree/list_store, model)
- GList list_item, liste, clist
- GEdit editable, entry, spin_button, combo
- GRange progress, progress_bar, range, scale, scrollbar
- GText view (also buffer, iter, mark, tag, tagtable)
While subtyping follows the Gtk widget hierarchy, you cannot always
use width subtyping (i.e. #super
is not unifiable with all the
subclasses of super). Still, it works for some classes, like
#widget
and #container
, and allows subtyping without coercion towards
these classes (cf. #container
in examples/pousse.ml for instance).
Practically, each widget class is composed of:
- a coerce method, returning the object coerced to the type widget.
- an as_widget method, returning the raw Gtk widget used for packing, etc...
- a destroy method, sending the destroy signal to the object.
- a get_oid method, the equivalent of Oo.id for Gtk objects.
- a connect sub-object, allowing one to widget specific signals (this is what prevents width subtyping in subclasses.)
- a misc sub-object, giving access to miscellanous functionality of the basic gtkwidget class, and a misc#connect sub-object.
- an event sub-object, for Xevent related functions (only if the widget has an Xwindow), and an event#connect sub-object.
- a drag sub-object, containing drag and drop functions, and a drag#connect sub-object.
- widget specific methods.
Here is a diagram of the structure (- for methods, + for sub-objects)
- coerce : widget
- as_widget : Gtk.widget obj
- destroy : unit -> unit
- get_oid : int
- ...
+ connect : mywidget_signals
| - after
| - signal_name : callback:(... -> ...) -> GtkSignal.id
+ misc : misc_ops
| - show, hide, disconnect, ...
| + connect : misc_signals
+ drag : drag_ops
| - ...
| + connect : drag_signals
+ event : event_ops
| - add, ...
| + connect : event_signals
You create a widget by <Module>.<widget name> options ... ()
.
Many optional arguments are admitted. The last two of them, packing:
and show:, allow you respectively to call a function on your newly
created widget, and to decide wether to show it immediately or not.
By default all widgets except toplevel windows (GWindow module) are
shown immediately.
For many constructor or method arguments, default values are provided.
Generally, this default value is defined by GTK, and you must refer
to GTK's documentation.
For ML defined defaults, usually default values are either false
, 0
, None
or NONE``, according to the expected type. Important exceptions are `~show`, which default to true in all widgets except those in **GWindow**, and `~fill`, which defaults to true or
BOTH``.
Note about unit as method argument:
O'Caml introduces no distinction between methods having side-effects and methods simply returning a value. In practice, this is confusing, and awkward when used as callbacks. For this reason all methods having noticeable side-effects should take arguments, and unit if they have no argument.
The GUtil module provides two kinds of utilities: a memo table, to be able to dynamically cast widgets to their original class, and more interesting ML-side signals. With ML-side signals, you can combine LablGTK widgets into your own components, and add signals to them. Later you can connect to these signals, just like GTK signals. This proved very efficient to develop complex applications, abstracting the plumbing between various components. Explanations are provided in GUtil.mli.
The GToolbox module contains contributed components to help you build your applications.
Important efforts have been dedicated to cooperate with Gtk's reference counting mechanism. As a result you should generally be able to use Gdk/Gtk data structures without caring about memory management. They will be freed when nobody points to them any more. This also means that you do not need to pay too much attention to whether a data structure is still alive or not. If it is not, you should get an error rather than a core dump. The case of Gtk objects deserves special care. Since they are interactive, we cannot just destroy them when they are no longer referenced. They have to be explicitely destroyed. If a widget was added to a container widget, it will automatically be destroyed when its last container is destroyed. For this reason you need only destroy toplevel widgets.
Since too frequent GC can severely degrade performance, since 2.18.4
it is possible to change the contribution of custom blocks to the
GC cycle, using the function GMain.Gc.set_speed
. The default is 10%
of what it was in 2.18.3. If you set it to 0, custom block allocation
has no impact, and you should consider running the Gc by hand.
IMPORTANT: Some Gtk data structures are allocated in the Caml heap,
and their use in signals (Gtk functions internally cally callbacks)
relies on their address being stable during a function call. For
this reason automatic compation is disabled in GtkMain. If you need
it, you may use compaction through Gc.compact
where it is safe
(timeouts, other threads...), but do not enable automatic compaction.
- LibGlade support: not available in Gtk3 (replaced by GtkBuilder)
- GL extension: not available in Gtk3
- SVG support: not available in Gtk3
- GnomeCanvas support: not available in Gtk3
- GtkSourceView 3 support: This binding was contributed by Benjamin Monate, and adapted by Hugo Herbelin. It requires libgtksourceview-3.x. See examples in examples/sourceview/*3.ml The executable must be linked with lablgtksourceview3.cma.
See README.win32 for detailed information on installation.
If you want to use threads, you must be aware of windows specific restrictions; see for instance: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.gimp.windows.devel/314 I.e. all GTK related calls must occur in the same thread, the one that runs the main loop. If you want to call them from other threads you need to do some forwarding. Fortunately, with a functional language this is easy. Two functions,
val async : ('a -> unit) -> 'a -> unit
val sync : ('a -> 'b) -> 'a -> 'b
are available in the GtkThread module to help you. They will forward your call to the main thread (between handling two GUI events). This can be either asynchronous or synchronous. In the synchronous case, beware of deadlocks (the trivial case, when you are calling from the same thread, is properly avoided). Note also that since callbacks are always called from the main loop thread, you can freely use GTK in them. Also, non-graphical operations are thread-safe. Here is an example using the lablgtk toplevel with threads:
% lablgtk3.bat -thread
Objective Caml version 4.07.1
# open GtkThread;;
# let w = sync (GWindow.window ~show:true) ();;
# let b = sync (GButton.button ~packing:w#add ~label:"Hello!") ();;
# b#connect#clicked (fun () -> prerr_endline "Hello");;
Since Darwin is Unix, this port compiles as usual.
Note however that Quartz imposes even stronger restrictions than
Windows on threads: only the main thread of the application can do
GUI work. Just apply the same techniques as described above, being
careful to ensure that your first call to GtkThread.main
occurs in
the main thread. This is done automatically in the threaded toplvel.
- Jacques Garrigue garrigue@math.nagoya-u.ac.jp
- Benjamin Monate benjamin.monate@free.fr
- Olivier Andrieu oandrieu@nerim.net
- Adrien Nader camaradetux@gmail.com
- Jun Furuse jun.furuse@gmail.com
- Maxence Guesdon maxence.guesdon@inria.fr
- Stefano Zacchiroli zack@cs.unibo.it
- Hugo Herbelin Hugo.Herbelin@inria.fr
- Claudio Sacerdoti Coen claudio.sacerdoticoen@inria.fr
- Christophe Troestler Christophe.Troestler@umons.ac.be
- Emilio Jesús Gallego Arias e@x80.org
- Hubert Fauque hubert.fauque@wanadoo.fr
- Koji Kagawa kagawa@eng.kagawa-u.ac.jp