DConf 2014 Day 2 Talk 3: Designing an Aurora: A Glimpse at the Graphical Future of D by Adam Wilson

[Tofu Ninja via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Thursday, 10 July 2014 at 10:43:45 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> Depends on what Aurora is meant to target. The video says it is 
> meant to be more of a playful environment that allows pac-man 
> mockups and possibly GUIs in the long run, but not sure who 
> would want that? There are so many much better IDE/REPL 
> environments for that: Swift, Flash&Co, HTML5/WebGL/Dart/PNaCL, 
> Python and lots of  advanced frameworks with engines for cross 
> platform mobile development at all kinds of proficiency levels.
>
> Seems to me what a language that D needs is two separate 
> frameworks:
>
> 1. A barebones 3D high performance library with multiple 
> backends that follow the hardware trends (kind of what you are 
> suggesting). Suitable for creating games and HPC stuff.
>
> 2. A stable high level API with geometric libraries for dealing 
> with established abstractions: font files, vector primitives, 
> PDF generation and parsing with canvas abstraction for both 
> screen/gui, print, file… Suitable for applications/web.
>
> 3. An engine layering of 2. on top of 1. for portable 
> interactive graphics but a higher abstraction level than 1.

YES(I am so glad some one else sees this)! This is basically what 
I have been saying all along. I hoped the immediate mode could be 
(1) and the retained mode could be (2/3) so that we could have 
both and not be limited, but that does not seem to be the 
direction it is going. It is not even clear what the immediate 
mode 'is' right now in the current designs of Aurora. It seems to 
be more of an implementation detail rather than something usable 
on its own.

As it stands now, the direction that Aurora is taking seems to be 
an odd one IMHO. It is trying to be some thing in between (1) and 
(2/3) but I don't think that is useful to any one except maybe 
gui writers. That is what prompted me to post.