breadcrumbs: Design Documents > chromium_link: Chromium chromium_os_link: Chromium OS home_link: Home page_name: widget-refactor title: Widget Refactor title_hdr: |

Background

A view hierarchy is hosted by a views::Widget subclass. This subclass (e.g. WidgetWin or WidgetGtk) receives native events from the operating system, cracks them into views-specific types and propagates them into the view hierarchy.

The current arrangement poses some challenges that make porting to a new native toolkit problematic:

  • The native Widget implementations are very thick. There is a lot of duplicated code that makes fixing bugs cumbersome.
  • Swapping native Widget implementations is problematic because they are stateful. The state is meaningful and may not have good analogs in other implementations.

Details

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