Ideas for a brand new widget toolkit

Gary Willoughby dev at nomad.so
Tue Aug 13 10:40:04 PDT 2013


The problem is that the scale of a project like this literally 
stops people from starting. Couple this with the fact that a non 
existent project doesn't attract any developers and you've got 
negative feelings from the start.

I wouldn't worry about that though!

I think the benefits of a project like this far outweigh any 
initial worries about scale. Personally, i would love for there 
to be a D GUI toolkit that is available for all D supported 
platforms. It would be awesome being able to create D GUI 
applications in a straight forward way and something which i 
truly think would attract many more developers to D. IMHO It's 
one of the two big attractors* to using any language, i.e. an 
easy to use GUI toolkit. I honestly think that's why C# and 
Python caught on as quickly as they did.

If work is started on a project like this and shows promise, i 
wouldn't be adverse to contributing.

Keep this quote in mind:

"Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with 
a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get 
large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it 
is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you 
might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. 
So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about 
some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some 
fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And 
don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these 
things work. You need to get something half-way useful first, and 
then others will say "hey, that almost works for me", and they'll 
get involved in the project."

Linus Torvalds - Linux Times (2004-10-25)
http://web.archive.org/web/20050404020308/http://www.linuxtimes.net/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=145

SO who will be the first to start? ;)

* The other is games programming capability but we'll leave 
discussing building a full opengl games programming framework for 
another thread. ;)


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