Cross Platform GUI Development

[Jacob Carlborg]

On Sunday, 23 March 2014 at 19:56:47 UTC, Denis Shelomovskij 
wrote:

> First, I don't understand what is the problem with GTK?

I looks ugly on both Windows and Mac OS X. It's also an extra 
dependency.

> Also there is DWT, but I already have spent some time on it and 
> I'd like to suggest to not use it as its sources is a mess.

What's wrong with DWT?

> As for cross-platform GUI app, I'd suggest to use own native 
> GUI library for every platform as it looks like an easiest and 
> the most convenient for the user of your program approach.

I think it's good to have a cross-platform GUI for the basic 
stuff that's available on all platforms. Like buttons, windows 
and so on. Then use the native GUI when platform specific widgets 
are needed.

> The problem is it's too common to connect application login and 
> GUI, so for my personal purposes I created MetaUI [1] which 
> allow such intermediate layer and you only create native GUI 
> elements, place it somewhere and connect with logic elements 
> from MetaUI, see examples. As a native GUI I use GTK (mainly my 
> own fast, correct and very usable bindings [2]) over MetaUI for 
> now, but when I will have more time I will use DGui on Windows 
> just to decrease program installation size.

> The only problem is a Mac OS X for which I don't know working 
> GUI library (I don't target it for now, GTK may work but with 
> PITA)

On OS X, anything that's not native Cocoa is not acceptable.

--
/Jacob Carlborg