SciD: the humble beginning

[dsimcha]

== Quote from Eldar Insafutdinov (e.insafutdinov at gmail.com)'s article
> 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.

I'm starting to get the feeling that the best way to figure out what GUI lib to
use would be to create a prototype of a very small portion of functionality (maybe
just bare-bones scatter plots or something easy like that) in each lib and
benchmark it and see what the relative difficulty is.  The other option is to make
sure everything is loosely coupled to the GUI lib so it can be easily swapped for
another one.  The downside is that this has some tradeoffs in terms of simplicity
and probably performance that I don't think I want to make and is probably a
classic example of overengineering.