GUI library

[Bruno Medeiros]

freeagle wrote:
> Hello D community.
> 
> I joined a while ago a talk at d.D.dwt about future of DWT and other 
> possible GUI toolkits. There were many opinions, but there was one that 
> I liked the most - making a cross platform GUI library that would use 
> OpenGL as a renderer. I know there was a project called Terra, but it 
> seems that it went down. So i decided i could make something similar. It 
> would be multithreaded lib from ground up because of the way openGL 
> works with multiple windows. I dont want to make any official 
> announcement of a development taking place until I ask the D community 
> if it would welcome such effort. And what would you like it to be 
> capable of. I have my own ideas, but i dont want to make something that 
> pleases me, but will be refused by majority of the devs.
> 
> freeagle

That would be pretty nice, especially being cross-platform and OpenGL
based, which I particularly like.

Since it is cross-platform, how are you planning to handle the OS
specific code? Write it yourself or re-use some code? Because it seems
to me it is much and unnecessary work to do it yourself, perhaps you
should use a cross-platform rendering lib, such as SDL or maybe Cairo ?
SDL seems a favorite for me, it the most abstracted one as it is only a
media layer library, it does not have 2D shape rendering stuff like
Cairo. But there are some problems: SDL currently (1.2) allows only one
GL context, which goes against your objectives of multiple windows, and
that has been a prominent disadvantage of SDL so far. (it was too
mentioned here in the newsgroup previously, when there were talks about
a common D media layer lib)
However, the 1.3 version of SDL, which is under development, will fully
support managing multiple GL contexts, so I think SDL would be great as
a GUI base rendering layer. I don't know however, is when it is expected
that SDL 1.3 will come out, if there is even such an estimate. (but
you're starting out yourself, so maybe it is worth it)

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - MSc in CS/E student
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D