GUI library

[freeagle]

Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> 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)
> 

I plan to write OS specific code myself. Whether it's more work or not 
is questionable. In SDL, you'd have to write child window logic 
yourself. But in my lib, child windows are normal OS windows ( in Win32 
WS_CHILD ) and thus every control logic is done by the OS. These child 
windows are transparent, so all OGL rendering is done just on the main 
parent window.