Flowstone - Toy or Real Deal?

[deraudrl]

I’m not a code programmer so I have to ask if stand-alone Ruby can do the graphical stuff that FlowStone Ruby can out of the box?

Almost certainly, as I doubt the GDI subset in FS is FS-specific. But if not, the wxRuby add-on mentioned on that blog will do all that and much more, since it's (mostly) a wrapper around wxWidgets: https://www.wxwidgets.org/. And it's certainly not the only such option.

Caveat: I know next to nothing about Ruby, and probably wouldn't go anywhere near it if it wasn't part of FS. But if I really had to gen up a Windows app using it*, that's how I'd approach the problem. (* That scenario would certainly need to include someone throwing money at me. )

[MichaelBenjamin]

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[deraudrl]

it's much easier to get gfx going in fs than rummaging in wxwidgets.
flowstone is like a wrapper around "supereasy but damn slow 2d gfx supported by windoze since 1999".
with wxwidgets you open up another hell of gui library.

Ok, at this point I have absolutely no idea what kind of non-audio/DSP GUI app you're planning on building with FS, but if you think that's easier than using something actually designed for such tasks, go for it.

[tulamide]

it's much easier to get gfx going in fs than rummaging in wxwidgets.
flowstone is like a wrapper around "supereasy but damn slow 2d gfx supported by windoze since 1999".
with wxwidgets you open up another hell of gui library.

Ok, at this point I have absolutely no idea what kind of non-audio/DSP GUI app you're planning on building with FS, but if you think that's easier than using something actually designed for such tasks, go for it.

I think you two are talking past each other. wxWidgets and similar libraries are tools that enable you to use the native GUI elements of the system you're working on. In our case the droplist, menu, button, window, dialog, etc, that Windows 10 offers.
But it doesn't help at all creating a GUI for an application like an instrument or a game or a drawing app, etc. For that you use either GDI+ (unfortunately) or OpenGL/DirectX and draw the elements (no matter if by bitmaps or vector graphics)