SciD: the humble beginning

[Eldar Insafutdinov]

dsimcha Wrote:

> == Quote from Eldar Insafutdinov (e.insafutdinov at gmail.com)'s article
> > dsimcha Wrote:
> > > Plotting.  I've considered doing this a few times, but I've decided it needs to be
> > > put off until D2 is stable and the GUI toolkits for it are reasonably stable.  One
> > > layer of instability (D2 itself) is workable, but two layers (D2 and the GUI libs)
> > > is not.
> > >
> > It would be unfair not to mention GtkD which nobody has done in your D2 GUI libs
> thread. I think that so far it is the most mature and stable cross-platform D2 GUI
> toolkit. It's been a year since it reached version 1.0, so you should probably
> consider it. And GTK looks just fine on windows.
> 
> Is it fast and stable on D2?  You're right that noone specifically mentioned it, I
> just got the vibe that there's no reasonably stable D2 GUI lib yet.  If you
> believe GtkD is stable enough to build other D2 libs on top of, that would be great.
> 
> Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought GTK made the tradeoff of being
> XML-based and therefore relatively slow but more flexible.  I absolutely 150%
> refuse to build a plotting library that chokes and takes a significant amount of
> time to redraw complex plots when a window is resized or moved, no matter how good
> it looks, how many features it has, or how extensible it is.

GTK uses Cairo library for drawing and I don't think there should be any trade-offs. GtkD contains bindings to Cairo and a few examples, but I haven't tried it myself. As for its stability of D2 version - I can't be sure, as I don't use it, but I've always thought it is reasonably stable. Developers of GtkD should know better of course.

There were some benchmarks comparing drawing performance of Gtk and Qt, and Qt was a magnitude faster. Also there has been done a lot of work on OpenGL backend for Qt, which will make things even faster. And as I said earlier on Qt already has plotting library Qwt (which is used for instance at the company I am working for). But you'd have to wait for a month or so until we finish our work.