wanting to try a GUI toolkit: needing some advice on which one to choose

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Tuesday, 1 June 2021 at 22:50:49 UTC, someone wrote:
> I noticed and struck me was the responsiveness of the GUI: 
> snappy as hell compared to the usual Windows 7 machines we 
> dealt with at the time, and, I mean snappy as hell **without** 
> customizing it disabling animations and the like, this was a 
> responsive GUI out-of-the-box. It was on gnome 2 of course. The 
> first time I saw gnome 3 was game over.

I am of a similar mindset as you, when I use Linux I tend to go 
minimal WM and setup.

It IS depressing how much resources editors use to reach the same 
fluidity as the editor I used on my Amiga in the 1980s (which 
used hardware registers for scrolling).


> IIRC openGL ES is for mobile not for desktop which needs plain 
> openGL.

Yes, but WebGL is basically the same as ES, WebAssembly 
containers... D is supposed to support those?


> Of course individually supporting the three main APIs is a 
> no-go, that's why I mentioned Vulkan, you say it is not mature, 
> it will mature. To me Vulkan is like Wayland, there's no going 
> back regardless whether you/we consider it has merits or not.

I don't know. Hardware vendors are eager to reach market with new 
hardware and will most likely continue to ship buggy drivers for 
the bleeding edge hardware? But we can always hope. :)


> Indeed. But the game industry has totally different 
> requirements/expectations for the hardware than we need to 
> write a classical 2D GUI toolkit. They need APIs close to the 
> hardware as possible and very often bypass everything in its 
> path seeking 3D performance gains.

Possibly. Yet, Skia release notes keep mentioning hardware 
related themes. I guess that could be your canary (wait until 
release notes no longer list hardware related issues).

> I guess Vulkan will have separate 2D/3D APIs like openGL so 
> this will be no major concern giving the huge different code 
> base size for each, but I am talking of pure guess, I will 
> eventually read about it (at least) out of sheer curiosity.

There is no such thing as 2D/3D anymore AFAIK? Shaders are fairly 
generic.

But you have to support at least Metal and Vulkan, and possibly 
WebGL. Skia is less work.