GUI library for D

[Michel Fortin]

On 2011-04-04 17:27:05 -0400, Matthias Pleh <jens at konrad.net> said:

> I would like to fill this gap and create a really good D GUI library
> 
> Any thoughts, comments ... ?

Just an observation...

Cross platform libraries are fine, but they generally aren't very great 
either. They'll always stretch in one way or another the standard way 
to do things when put on a given platform. The end result will almost 
always look substandard when using that library in the environment it 
was not primarily designed for.

On the other hand, one thing that is missing right now, in D and in 
most languages, is a standard way to display graphics. By that I mean 
if we had in Phobos a module that could just open a window and let you 
draw things in it, it'd make learning programming much more fun and 
it'd be useful for rapid prototyping of anything that involves 
graphics. It doesn't need to be complicated -- it doesn't even need to 
have a GUI -- just drawing things and viewing them somewhere on a 
screen would be great. Later on you can add click support, full screen 
mode and other features if deemed useful, but the goal would never be 
provide bindings for every piece of GUI on all platforms.

So my observation is that a cross platform full-featured GUI will 
always fail somewhere (mostly where those platforms differs) whereas a 
cross platform drawing module with display capabilities is much more 
universally useful, is more easily approachable, and is much less code 
to maintain.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/