Announcing Luigi -- WIP teaser

[Bill Baxter]

Lutger wrote:
> Bill Baxter wrote:

> Cool, I'm looking forward to checking it out once dsource is back 
> online. I think XML has more benefits, such as using it with a visual 
> designer and being able to modify the GUI without recompiling (modding 
> comes to mind).

Yep I can believe it is useful.  But I've been watching the development 
of CEGUI for a while, which took the XML-for-everything approach, and 
after few years at it they still don't have a good toolchain for editing 
their XML files AFAIK.  So instead of something easier to use than a 
C++-code GUI, what you have is something that still requires 
hand-editing text, but now it has to be done in horribly verbose XML, 
and without the benefit of your Intellisense IDE to help you remember 
what parameters each widget takes.   AND you get the complications of 
having to make sure your exe can find the XML files at run time.  And 
probably you still have to set up callbacks from the code side, so 
you've got additional synchronization issues between the code and the 
XML files.  And you've now probably added a dependency on an external 
XML parsing tool.

XML makes some sense in the long run, but not unless you have a whole 
lot of manpower, IMHO.  wxWidgets is now I think finally to the point 
where their XML GUI xrc stuff works pretty reliablly and is decently 
supported by tools.  But it took a heck of a long time, and I think the 
nice editing tools aren't free (DialogBlocks is the best I know of), 
because those take a lot of manpower to create too.

Anyway I'm after something that will be usable with a few weeks of 
effort, not a decade.

> That is good to hear, there is no gui like this for D yet, even in c / 
> c++ there are but a few easy to slap in gui toolkits, mostly still too 
> bloated imho.
> 
> Besides GLFW, are there more dependencies?

I'm using Derelict for both GLFW and GL.  But that's it for 
dependencies.  I'd like to figure out how to leave the choice of how to 
access OpenGL up to the user too, but I'm not sure how or if it's 
technically even possible.  Maybe I just need to extern all the gl 
functions I'm using?

Also, all the GLFW code is all in one file: luigi/adaptor/glfw.d
The user needs to import this in their app to get the GLFW support.

--bb