Ideal D GUI Toolkit

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Mon, 20 May 2013 23:00:10 -0700
"Adam Wilson" <flyboynw at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 20 May 2013 20:46:48 -0700, Tyler Jameson Little  
> <beatgammit at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > If we're generally in agreement that a UI toolkit is a good
> > direction, I'd love to waste the next few months of my life doing
> > something that likely won't go anywhere. I personally think it's
> > much more exciting to make something in native D instead of trying
> > to work around the lack of concern other C++ toolkits like Qt have
> > for cross-language portability.
> 
> I can't tell if this is snark or not so I'll assume it isn't. :-) I
> don't know how likely cross-language portability is to be achieved by
> any UI toolkit, way to many things that need more advanced language
> features. If we use D we'd probably end-up using a non-portable set
> of language features anyways...
> 
> It'd be nice, but given how constraining C++ is compared to D it
> might not be practical in the long run. Although the rendering
> interface might be able to plug with D. That should be simple
> enough...
> 

I was thinking that starting out by building off of bindings to a C/C++
library could be a good idea for two reasons:

- Hedging bets. If the D-ification runs into any problems (either the
  project as a whole, or just a specific problem that a user needs to
  temporarily work around), there's always the raw binding to fall back
  on. Besides, any brand-new API/lib is naturally going to be riskier
  than bindings to a proven one.

- Bootstrapping. I find that building off an existing thing, even if
  you just end up replacing it with a homemade solution later
  (usually piecemeal), helps get the project jump-started, which gets
  you to more important things (such as a usable/stable state) earlier,
  which also helps maintain morale and momentum.