Standard GUI framework inspired by Qt

[Jonas Drewsen via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 3 March 2015 at 22:16:36 UTC, Freddy wrote:
> On Tuesday, 3 March 2015 at 18:43:50 UTC, Aram wrote:
>> 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
> I'm not much of a gui person,but what is the advantage of using 
> QML over D's import 
> statements(http://dlang.org/expression.html#ImportExpression) 
> and CTFE.

No need to recompile (ie. have the source code) the app you are 
doing when you change the QML. This in turn also speeds up design 
iterations.