Open GL Bindings (was Re: GPGPU Arrays)

[Tomas Lindquist Olsen]

On Fri, 13 Jul 2007 07:27:05 -0400, Tristam MacDonald wrote:

> Why, why, why would you want a GUI toolkit in the core library? What is
> wrong with having a separate (possibly installed by default) GUI lib?
> 
> Phobos is already over a megabyte in most environments, and only shipped
> as a static library. If I am distributing a simple command line tool, I
> *do not* want another meg (and it could easily be 3 times that) of GUI
> junk statically linked in. I know that dead code stripping and similar
> *should* remove that excess junk, but from my experience this is not
> reliable.
> 
> Even if phobos/tango, etc. are shipped as dynamic libraries, they still
> don't come pre-installed in most environments, necessitating that any
> installers include them, so size is still a concern.
> 
> And beyond all that, OpenGL is not really a generally useful tool. With
> out a full fledged GUI toolkit (with all widgets, etc.) that allows
> embedding OpenGL contexts in controls, it is only really useful for games
> and screensavers. Libraries such as GLFW suffer from a severe sparsity of
> features, as they are only designed to support games.
> 
> Seriously, how hard is it to drop gl.d and glfw.d into your project?
> 

I must say I agree here. There are way too many things to
consider for *any* type of graphics toolkit for it to go in the
standard library IMHO.

What we really need is people to start using DSSS. And if necessary
make DSSS easier to use. That would make it really easy for anyone
to get the libraries they want.