Erlang for desktop applications?

[Jacobo García de Polavieja]

Ryan Rawson wrote:
> Ironically GTK doesn't really address the realistic needs of a desktop
> application.  Printing?  Maybe things are better than the last time I
> looked at it, but I don't care as much about Linux on the desktop.
> 
> I heard that wxWindows is not so great for large apps.  I don't know
> why, but I suspect it may have to do with the class structure or
> something.
> 
> As for OSX, sounds good to me :-)
> 
> On 8/6/06, CyBerHigh <cyberhigh@REDACTED> wrote:
>> Cocoa bindings would only be good for mac.  I think there needs to be
>> GTK bindings or a new GUI built around erlang.  I beleave erlang could
>> be used now for desktops apps, only if there GUI where there.  But a few
>> fixes to how it handles strings and floating point numbers would make
>> for an even better enverment to work in.
>> Ryan Rawson wrote:
>> > Have a look a F# - OCaml on .NET.
>> >
>> > Also check out wings3d - a "desktop appliation" written in Erlang.
>> >
>> > The real problems behind writing a desktop app I think have to do with
>> > UI and GUI issues.  For example, TK is an ugly UI on any system - and
>> > its the widly available default UI.
>> >
>> > What I really want is Cocoa bindings.  Maybe I should write that.
>> >
>> > -ryan
>> >
>> >
>> > On 8/6/06, Jacobo García de Polavieja Aguilera
>> > <jacobopolavieja@REDACTED> wrote:
>> >> Hi everybody:
>> >> I am new to functional programming (just some very little experience
>> >> with Lisp). I got interested in functional programming because of the
>> >> performance related to multiproccessors or multicore systems. And I 
>> got
>> >> interested in Erlang over other FP languages because its fame for easy
>> >> parallelism management and its performance compared to Haskell or
>> >> others.
>> >> But, do you see Erlang suitable for developing future (more than 5 
>> years
>> >> from now) desktop applications? I know it wasn't designed for this, 
>> and
>> >> that there are very important actions like string functions which are
>> >> slow in Erlang... but then I also ran into EX11 and similar projects
>> >> which seem like a little light for my future purpose.
>> >> Could be erlang efficient with desktop related stuff? If not, could 
>> you
>> >> recommend other functional languages that fit best that objective?
>> >> I'm looking forward to efficiency on future multicore processors and
>> >> easy concurrency management.
>> >>
>> >> Thanks all.
>> >>
>> >>
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>>
>>
> 

Please don't turn this into a Cocoa VS GTK or OSX VS Linux debate ;-).
WxWindows is not suitable for large application because it's a subset of 
all de backends it supports (GTK, WindowsForms, etc), so it gets 
complicated to do a big and nice GUI. It's usually pretty limited.

What I'm trying to address here is... if there was a nice GUI 
(whichever) for Erlang... would Erlang be a nice option to develop 
desktop applications seeing dual and quadcore processors are coming?
Even more... would it be suitable to develop its own GUI?

Thanks for all the answers.