Ideal D GUI Toolkit

Tyler Jameson Little beatgammit at gmail.com
Sun May 19 23:59:46 PDT 2013


> It's come up before, and I don't think that any sort of 
> decision has ever been
> made on that, though personally, that strikes me as the sort of 
> thing that
> doesn't really belong in the standard library. Certainly, if it 
> did end up in
> there, it would probably have to be very minamalistic.

That's exactly what I want, something to build off of. I'm 
thinking modeling it on Clutter or something like this: 
http://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/cws.pdf. The link is to a simple, 
nested windowing system that serves as the basic architecture of 
the Plan9 GUI. It's super simple and flexible. Everything would 
be asynchronous, and only the most essential components would be 
provided.

> Also, I thought that general consensus had been that while it 
> would be awesome
> to have a GUI toolkit written in D at some point, that's the 
> sort of thing
> that takes a ton of time and effort, and we have enough other 
> stuff that needs
> doing that the time and effort of the community was better 
> spent on other
> things and that wrapping a C++ GUI toolkit was a better move 
> for the
> forseeable future (with a full D GUI toolkit being something 
> that might happen
> once D is much larger). But anyone who wants to work on a GUI 
> toolkit in D is
> welcome to do it. IIRC, there was at least one small one done 
> in D1 using
> OpenGL. And having at least a minimal one so that very basic 
> GUIs could be
> written fully in D would certainly be very cool.

That's the feeling I got. If it's designed well, it might be one 
of the major things that draws people to D, and everyone would 
benefit from that.

I'm willing to work on one, but I don't want to duplicate effort 
if the community is already standardizing on something. I ran 
into that earlier when I tried to expand std.json, only to find 
out that a std.serialize was in the works, hence the question.

I can't say I'm an expert, but I've got a little extra time and I 
want to eventually build a game in D, and I need something to 
build off of.


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