obsolete D libraries/modules

[Peter Williams]

On 29/08/13 16:34, Peter Williams wrote:
> On 29/08/13 16:11, Rikki Cattermole wrote:
>> I will say this, one thing about D that has annoyed me from the
>> beginning is the state of the gui libs. Hence why in last month I've
>> been having a real good play around with OpengGL and creating my own
>> library [1].
>
> On this topic, I started looking at porting one of my PyGTK applications
> to GtkD and found that the knowledge of PyGTK API wasn't a great deal of
> help in this endeavor.  I think the problem is Python's "duck typing"
> and dynamic typing allow for a very flexible API that is much simpler
> than GTK+'s and GtkD's is much like GTK+'s.  The problem is complicated
> by the fact that the amount of documentation is huge and it's often
> difficult to find where something is defined.
>
> Anyway, long story short, I've decided to investigate the feasibility of
> rewriting the parts of GTK+ that I like directly in D.  It's early days
> yet and the code is in a private repository on github.  I'll keep it
> private until I have some useful subset working at which time I'll make
> it public.  Of course, if I find that it's all too hard I'll just delete
> it.
>
> Early indications are that the code will be much simpler than the
> original as GTK+ implements its own OOP and GC where I'll just delegate
> that to D. :-)

Reality check :-) - this is a huge job.  So I've amended my goals a 
little.  New plan is to start with just replacing the gtk+/gtk component 
and use wrappers to gdk, pango etc.  I did think about chucking it in 
altogether and using GtkD but the API in there hints that the onus of 
managing memory is placed on the user and that just makes writing a GUI 
that much harder.

I'm hoping that my wrappers can be implemented in such a way that memory 
management is hidden inside them.

Peter