Thus, Henning and I whipped up an editor using mGTK that can handle Unicode. Oh, and did I mention that you can it compile with either Moscow ML or MLton without changing the source?

The real story is of course that I we were trying to build a “real” application using mGTK, and the editor example shows that the gtk+ widgets handle Unicode fine. Wereas I’m not sure that SML handles Unicode “fine”, String.size does not return the number of characters but the number of bytes. But at least TextIO does not mess up the bytes (in Moscow ML at least, didn’t test with MLton).

Oh, and I used file and gedit to check that the file I saved really was Unicode.

Currently the only missing bits are better support for the lower levels of the library stack most notably GDK, but also Glib, ATK, and Pango. Which means that there are no pretty monkeys and the drag and drop example does not compile, yet. The source code for the examples can be found in the mGTK CVS.

Next up, is polish of the bindings generator for MLton which is currently not as well as the Moscow ML generator. The only thing missing is support for out-arguments. However, Henning is on the case, so the problems should be solved within days(?!?). A release is sooo close. That fells really good because it has taken three years to come this far.

By joining forces with Henning we were able to compile the example for the following screenshot:

The email entry-box is updated dynamically when you type something in the two other entry boxes. Mnemonics works, that is, if you press ALT-f the focus jumps to the entry-box for the first name and the text is selected. And all that in less than 100 lines of SML code.