D "Swing"

[Chris]

> Am one of those who prefer to use native widgets compared to 
> something like GTK. But as you say they don't all provide all 
> features. I think a good idea is the use a cross-platform GUI 
> library for the common widgets that exists on all platforms, 
> i.e. buttons and windows. There's not reason to use the native 
> API for those. Then extend that with platform specif code using 
> the native API, i.e. unified tool bar, sheets and so on, that 
> is found on Mac OS X.

But there will always be the issue of "feature not yet supported" 
and bugs are introduced when the same code is run on a higher 
version of a given os. And it may take a while to fix it, i.e. to 
know what has changed in the new version etc. Native bindings are 
a never ending story. I have worked with some native-binding 
framworks and there is always an issue (maybe even a bug in the 
native os).


> I agree that it would be really nice to have a cross-platform 
> GUI framework written explicitly for D. But as you say that 
> would be an enormous task to do.

Not sure. Maybe trying to catch up with and cater for at least 3 
different platforms is the bigger task in the long run.

In my opinion, as D is getting ever more mature, it is about time 
we had a reliable standard cross-platform GUI. It need not be a 
framework like Swing. Maybe a more modern solution (HTML etc) 
would do the trick. I think there is a widening gap between what 
you can do with D in terms of business logic (a lot) and what you 
can do with it in terms of connecting it to the desktop / 
smartphone, i.e. to the user. D has what it takes but languages 
can only take off if they have some sort of GUI too (cf. 
Objective-C after the iPhone was introduced, and app development 
in general). Sorry, that's my marketing mind speaking again.