FLTK native in 'D'. Would that be useful?

[Charles D Hixson]

Anders F Björklund wrote:
> matthiasm wrote:
> 
>> I am one of the co-authors of FLTK. I like 'D' and as a test I have
>> manually
>> translated parts of FLTK into native 'D' code. This is obvioulsy very
>> different from just writing a wrapper,
>> more involved, but also more rewarding.
>>
>> Before I jump into manually porting a few hundred thousand lines of
>> code, I
>> would really like to know first if the 'D' community is interested in
>> such a thing at all and if I can get
>> sufficient support and a reasonable number of users.
>> What do you folks think?
> 
> Having a "lightweight" widget toolkit available for D would be a good
> thing, if it was native to D (i.e. not using C++ libs) - even better!
> 
> C...
> 
> --anders

That thing about "native to D" is more important that it at
first appears.  On Linux there are two different versions of
D with two different linking conventions.

dmd, the Digital Mars D, doesn't link well (at all?) with
system libraries.  Some people have managed to make it work,
and my hat is off to them.

gdc, OTOH, uses the standard system linkages, but is always
out of step with dmd. (Naturally.  D is a moving target, and
gdc is not a full time job.)

This means that things that require system libraries, like
GUIs, can be very...sporadically working...when using D and
Linux.  This is the more noticeable as most of the
development work on graphics is happening only on MSWind
(for obvious reasons).  There are a few exceptions, and I
cherish them!, but a native graphics toolkit would just
SOLVE the problem.