Ideas for a brand new widget toolkit

[Adam D. Ruppe]

Coincidentally, I started slapping one together over the weekend.

As you can see, it is hideous:
http://arsdnet.net/gui.png

And if I saw someone else coding a gui the way I am, I'd call 
them silly for rejecting all things that are good and decent.

So, what am I doing and why am I doing it that way?

Let's start with the why:

Qt and GTK are just too big, and other lightweight wrappers still 
tend to have runtime requirements that i hate. I want to be able 
to distribute a stand-alone exe that people can use that is < 1 
MB, so there's a reasonable download time from my slow computer.

The qtd and gtkd wrappers make them even bigger and more fragile. 
The D forms library is ok, still a bit big and buggy when I 
tried, but the real blocker there is zero linux support.

So I'm doing just win32 and xlib, built on my simpledisplay.d 
that already provides basics. Since xlib doesn't provide any 
widgets, I'm diying there. (But might change my mind later and 
dynamically link gtk, idk, the linux version will probably only 
be used by myself so it isn't that important.)

My goal: provide very basic, but useful, capabilities in one D 
module.



What exactly am I doing? Just drawing rectangles and reading 
events (simpledisplay.d supports these, and I'm improving it as 
needed for this) and calling it a gui!


I don't my approach of from scratch, custom widgets is a good 
idea in most cases.