Standard GUI framework inspired by Qt

[Rikki Cattermole via Digitalmars-d]

On 4/03/2015 7:43 a.m., 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

Also, you can drop Qt almost completely for wanting its window creation 
functionality.

http://github.com/Devisualization/window

I've got a bunch of other projects, image, model loading, scene graph. 
Google Material design GUI toolkit but it is a LONG way off.
I also have started (locally) a new GUI toolkit that uses the Buffer2D 
context instead of OpenGL.

And yes, Devisualization.Window works on the three big platforms.