A new lame UI toolkit for D

[Roberto Alsina]

In article <e24ro3$2rpk$1 at digitaldaemon.com>,
=?UTF-8?B?QW5kZXJzIEYgQmrDtnJrbHVuZA==?= says...
>
>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.
>:-)

Hey, I got resizing and the "ACTION" callback, too!

>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.

The Qt code is so much cleaner than the Motif backend it's not even
funny. I expect the same thing would happen when switching to the new mac
toolkits.

>One is table-driven and one is OOP, but they're both minimalistic...

A OO D wrapper around IUP should be rather simple to implement.
Sure, you end up having more layers than the average cake:

Carbon->Qt->IUP->DIUP->OO wrapper

or

X11->Qt->IUP->DIUP->OO wrapper

>Which has the positive side-effect of them being a lot smaller, too.

Yup. I guesstimate the Qt backend to about 2KLOC which is very little
when it comes to toolkits.

>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.

At my current rate, if I can keep up the interest for about a week there 
should be a working IUP/Qt. Then again, that's a pretty big IF!