GTK3 bindings for Nim language available

[Stefan Salewski <mail ssalewski de>]

We have some basic Nim GTK3 bindings available now, see

https://github.com/StefanSalewski?tab=repositories

Of course this note is only for smart people interested in Nim language
(http://nim-lang.org/) and GTK3 development.

The bindings are not really high level -- there is no Nim
Garbage-Collector support and sometimes type casts are necessary. But
they support to a large extend OO like notation as known from languages
like Python or Ruby. Smart people should be able to convert C, Python,
Ruby, Vala code to Nim GTK3 without larger problems. (Conversion from C
is supported by the Nim c2nim tool.) But currently there is no tutorial
and only minimal example code. As a non trivial example I have converted
test-completion.c from gtksourceview package to Nim, see
https://github.com/StefanSalewski/nim-gtksourceview/tree/master/test.
And I adapted the code of the Aporia Nim IDE initially written for GTK2
so that it compiles and partly works with GTK3, but that one is
currently far away from an example of clean Nim code -- many casts and
addr() operators. The bindings are generated with help of c2nim tool
from late GTK 3.15.xx C headers and should mostly cover GTK 3.16. Only
tested for Linux yet, for Windows and Mac some fixes may be necessary.
(There is no package manager support currently, so you have to download
all 10 packages manually from github and you may have to create some
links from your working directory to the modules.) Of course there is
work left, mostly testing and fine tuning, adding package manager
support and maybe writing a tutorial. But I do not know if I will find
time for that this year.