Java > Scala

[Adam Wilson]

On Tue, 06 Dec 2011 00:48:44 -0800, Andrej Mitrovic  
<andrej.mitrovich at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 12/6/11, Jacob Carlborg <doob at me.com> wrote:
>> Doesn't sound very effective.
>
> I don't know what that bubbling is all about. You can easily intercept
> a signal to a child window via std.signals, in Qt this would be
> installing an event filter of some sort. So sink/bubble seems
> unnecessary.
>
> The library is far from being efficient. It recreates a main window
> memory buffer on each paint message from the OS (IOW very often), also
> unless I'm mistaken the widgets themselves don't have a backbuffer so
> the library assumes their paint routines are not expensive. But that's
> fixable.
>
> I don't know why HTML was used, although that's just an alternative
> front-end to the library as far as I can tell. It does seem like this
> library died pretty quickly, I don't recall of any projects that used
> it.
>
> Anyway, I don't know if Adam wants to work on a native or non-native
> GUI, for native ones in pure-D (not a wrapper over existing GUIs) he
> can look at DFL or something else from here:
> http://prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?GuiLibraries
>
> But the library is modular enough and could be used as a starting point,  
> imo.

The use of HTML is a bit contrived I think. HTML is a Document Markup  
Language and was primarily intended to format research papers for  
transmission and viewing over the early internet. To build a good UI, you  
need a much more expressive design language.

My goal for the project is what you would term non-native in that it does  
not make use of the OS widgets; however the plan is to provide native  
looking skins for the widgets. I'd like to design something that  
interfaces with the machine at a lower level than widgets. On Windows I am  
targeting Direct2D, on Linux, OpenGL is the best candidate, and on OSX,  
well OpenGL might work but OSX has a lot of options to explore, and I  
don't have access to a Mac. (Anybody know how to get OSX working on  
VirtualBox?)

That wiki link is fantastic, I had no idea there were that many GUI  
projects going for D! Although it looks like the only ones that did what  
I'd like to do are dead (Rae and Harmonia)... Guess it's time to give it  
another shot.

-- 
Adam Wilson
Project Coordinator
The Horizon Project
http://www.thehorizonproject.org/