Erlang for desktop applications?

[Marc van Woerkom]

> 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?
This boils down to two options
a) creating a GUI well fitting to Erlang (which is distributed, message 
passing and functional)
b) interfacing an existing GUI to Erlang

I would like see a) of course. But except that every standard GUI is 
event driven, which could be mapped to
Erlang processes, I have yet to see a nice functional approach to 
creating a GUI.
Haskell with its monads, which is kind of a imperative DSL within Haskell
seems to be a bit further ahead conceptually. But even those folks stick 
to a GTK binding
when doing GUIs, if I see it correctly.

Developing something like GTK or any other portable GUI toolkit, is a 
major pain
in the behind, and the folks who want to do Erlang usually don't want to 
take off
a few years to develop and maintain such a huge subsystem.

But if you like, go for it. :-)

Regards,
Marc