Graphics Library for D

[Adam Wilson]

On Mon, 13 Jan 2014 15:46:42 -0800, Matt Taylor <taylorius at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> Hi
>
> I'm a new contributor to this site - I'm trying D out, and liking it a  
> lot. Though I'm new to D, my background is in computer graphics, so I'm  
> excited to see graphics capabilities being discussed, and I thought I'd  
> add my two-penneth.
>

Welcome! We could use all the help we can get! I'll be announcing firmer  
plans this weekend after I've had a chance to write them out. Stay tuned.

> Firstly, there seems to be disagreement on exactly what is to be  
> developed. I've seen 3 types of things discussed.
>
> 1. GUI Library. It seems to me that a really well designed GUI system  
> would be - by far - the most valuable thing for increasing the  
> widespread use of D. I would use it in a heartbeat if such a thing  
> existed.
>

Aurora is not a GUI library.

> 2. 2D/3D Graphics interface to underlying hardware. This can be useful -  
> though it's not clear to me that the 2D part would be terribly useful on  
> its own, without 3D OpenGL support, or possibly acting as primitives for  
> a GUI library. I suppose 2D games could use it.
>

This is what Aurora is intended to be. The 2D part could be used as the  
building blocks for a GUI or games or whatever else you can come up with.  
Aurora is intended to be a general-purpose graphics library for D. It  
should be usable on any device/platform that D supports or will support.

> 3. High quality 2D, SVG-style renderer, capable of rendering to  
> arbitrary bitmaps. Not sure what the point of this is, or who would use  
> it. At any rate, it seems sufficiently specialised that it doesn't  
> belong in a core library.
>

I tend to agree that SVG is a bit specialized for our purposes with  
Aurora. If someone wants to implement an SVG renderer on top of Aurora  
though, that would be valid and useful but not within the scope of Aurora  
itself.

> If it were up to me (I know, it isn't) - I would create a graphics  
> system for D based on a modern web-browser's Javascript DOM. I daresay  
> not everything would map well to D, but I would start with that, and  
> adapt it where necessary. I would include WebGL 2.0 support, mouse  
> handling callbacks etc.
>

Do you mean HTML DOM? This would be similar to XAML and both are UX  
languages which are unrelated to the purpose and goal of Aurora. And don't  
think this would translate to well into D code. One of the goals is to use  
idiomatic D as much as possible.

> But that's just me :-)
>
> Best Regards
>
> Matt Taylor
>

-- 
Adam Wilson
IRC: LightBender
Aurora Project Coordinator