dmd support for IDEs

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 10/12/09 14:11, language_fan wrote:
> Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:02:11 +0200, Jacob Carlborg thusly wrote:
>
>> On 10/12/09 04:14, Chad J wrote:
>>> Too bad we can't just make programs switch between GUI backends at will
>>> ;)
>>
>> Why not have a GUI toolkit available on almost all platforms that uses
>> native controls just like DWT?
>
> The list of native platforms SWT supports is this:
>
> Win32
>    WPF (under development)
> AIX, FreeBSD, Linux, HP-UX, Solaris:
>    Motif
>    GTK+
> Mac OS X:
>    Carbon
>    Cocoa
> QNX Photon
> Pocket PC
>
> As a FLTK2, Qt 3.x, Qt 4.x, Swing, and (forked) Harmonia user I fail to
> see how SWT is more native than the ones I develop for. All SWT
> applications look weird, unthemed, and have horrible usability issues in
> the file open/save dialogs. DWT brings another level of cruft above the
> "lightweight" SWT and performs badly.

As a said previously SWT is more native because it uses the native GUI 
library available on the current platform, for windows (before vista) 
win32, osx cocoa and on linux gtk. It doesn't decide how a button should 
look, it doesn't try do draw a button that is similar to the natives, it 
just call the native library to draw the button.

I don't know what you mean by "unthemed" but if you refer to that 
applications on windows don't get the winxp look you have the same 
problem if you create the application in c++ or c and uses win32. It's 
caused by an older dll is loaded as default and to get the winxp look 
you have to request it to load the newer dll with a manifest file. 
Welcome to dlls.

If you have problems with the open/save dialogs in SWT either you will 
have the same problem in other native applications because it uses the 
native dialogs or there's a bug in SWT.

DWT doesn't add any extra levels that SWT doesn't have. In fact it 
removes one, the jni wrappers. DWT is a complete port of SWT to D, with 
only native code.