Making a GTK application in Haskell, part 1
This tutorial demonstrates how to build a GTK 4 and libadwaita desktop application in Haskell using the Elm Architecture pattern.
summary is enough It provides a clear architectural blueprint for Haskell GUIs, but code snippets are foundational and partially truncated.
summary
The article starts a series on building a native todo-list application using Haskell, GTK 4, and libadwaita. It introduces haskell-gi for bindings and applies the Elm Architecture (Model-View-Update) to manage application state and side effects. The author outlines domain modeling with sum types, an update function testable in GHCi, and a basic GTK view layout. Subsequent parts will build out the complete application logic.
key points
- Uses the haskell-gi toolkit to generate type-safe bindings for GTK 4 and libadwaita.
- Adopts the Elm Architecture to structure state transitions and isolate imperative code.
- Demonstrates pure domain modeling and update functions testable directly in GHCi.
who should read it
Intermediate Haskellers interested in native desktop GUI development.
discussion positive
consensus
Commenters find the use of Haskell for GUIs compelling, but debate the frustrations of GTK 4's direction and dependency management.
pushback
Some experienced Haskell GUI developers note that manual signal wiring with haskell-gi can quickly get messy compared to reactive frameworks.
i've been writing Haskell GUIs for a few years and mostly stick to react-banana or reflex because wiring up gtk-gi signals manually gets messy fast. The Elm architecture pattern here looks clean on paper but I'm curious how you handle async events from the widget tree without ending up in callback hell. Did you end up wrapping all GI callbacks in a channel that feeds into your update loop?
It raises practical architectural questions about handling async events and callback scaling in Haskell GTK apps.
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