A new lame UI toolkit for D

[Anders F Björklund]

Lars Ivar Igesund wrote:

>>IUP is a neat and slim toolkit, even if it is somewhat lowlevel
>>and only does Motif (beyond Windows) at the moment (not GTK/Mac)
> 
> According to Roberto's blog, he is actually on his way to make a Qt backend,
> even got a window up.

Well, even I got a window up in a Mac driver of IUP, before I stopped.
:-)

But I guess he'll be making more progress, even if it'll require Qt...
Qt4 is nice, even if it "costs" too much for my projects (GPL or $$$)


A Mac driver for IUP, and a Mac driver for MinWin, would still be neat;
but for the time being I'm just using wxWidgets as that is already done.

There's also a matter of the previous Mac drivers needing porting, from
QuickDraw and Toolbox - over to Quartz 2D and CoreFoundation/HIToolbox.

But the newer (Mac OS X 10.3+) UI system should be *easier* to write to,
as it now has a view hierarchy that the old system (OS 9 / 10.1) didn't.


As for GTK+, I have seen that it gives very good results on Linux and
it sure looks nicer than what the "oldskool" Motif interface does... ?

MinWin already does GTK+, and it wouldn't hurt if IUP did GTK+ too.
(think it has been on the IUP library "To Do" list for a while, but)

Even if the two libraries (IUP and MinWin) have different designs,
their "implementation" is somewhat similar - at least "in spirit" ?


One is table-driven and one is OOP, but they're both minimalistic...
Which has the positive side-effect of them being a lot smaller, too.

When compared with the big ones like SWT, Qt, or wxWidgets, I mean ?
(Looking at the newsgroup and forum, it seemed DWT grinded to a halt)

And it's possible to use the X11 versions on the Mac, while gathering
resources for true / native ports. OpenOffice does this, for instance.

--anders