Standard GUI framework inspired by Qt
Aram via Digitalmars-d
digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Tue Mar 3 10:43:48 PST 2015
Hi all
I've been thinking over a GUI framework for D for some time, and
ended up with idea expressed by Andrew Fedoniouk here:
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/32633.html.
That is, having a separate drawing layer, and widgets built on
top of it. But since it has already been discussed 9 years ago, I
wonder if such a framework has ever been implemented.
In that duscussion many participants agreed that Qt would be a
good foundation, but had very restrictive license. Things have
changed since then, and Qt now is available under LGPL, which, to
my undestanding, makes it suitable for the purpose of standard
GUI library (please correct me if I am wrong on this). The
license, of course, may change in the future, preventing us from
using their updates for our drawing engine. But if we are able to
start using the engine now, in the future we can maintain the
updates ourselves.
Now, how I envision the library's design:
The library will be mostly implemented in D, except for drawing
engine and event loop, which are system-dependent. Those two
parts will be extracted from Qt into a separate library which
will be linked to by the rest of framework either statically or
dynamically. There will be bindings for sending drawing
instructions to drawing engine, as well as for retrieving system
and GUI events from event loop.
The system-independent part will mimic architecture of Qt.
However, for maximum flexibility and customizability, GUI will
utilize QML+CSS approach, and Qt's layout manager classes will be
dropped completely. Also there is no need to port classes that
are available in D, such as collections and strings.
If there is no standard GUI for D yet, and if LGPL license fits
our purpose, then I am looking for 2-3 Qt experts to join me and
build the framework.
Thanks,
Aram
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