FLTK: proposed fork

Mon Nov 17 14:14:48 2025 UTC

FLTK a.k.a. Fast Light Toolkit (see https://www.fltk.org/) is a C++ widget library, initially written fully within the subset of C++ we consider acceptable.

Unfortunately, starting with versions 1.4.*, some 'new developers' moved the project to CMake, which is too bad already, and since 1.5.*, they started to "use more modern C++ features", which roughly means for us the project is dead. If we still want to have it, then we have to make a fork, perhaps basing on the latest 1.3.* version.

Evaluation of the sources is still to be done to understand our options. It is very possible we'll have to drop the support for platforms we don't work with, may be even making it X-Window-only. What we really need is to bundle the sources with the part of Xlib on which FLTK depends, and get rid of external tools other than the compiler and make, if any.

It is, unfortunately, very possible that, as the result of the evaluation, we'll have to admit it all is too hard for us to do. But at least we need someone reasonable to take a close look.

Thanks!