What Features Should A GUI toolkit have?

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 6 March 2015 at 10:42:37 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Fri, 2015-03-06 at 10:01 +0000, via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> 
> […]
>> Components are coming to HTML5:
>> 
>> […]
>> 
>> It could work out nicely.
>> 
>
> On the other hand for a non-browser UI, it doesn't really make 
> sense!

Not sure what you mean by a "non-browser UI". You need a model, a 
layout engine, a composition engine and know-how. Competing with 
browser engines is a lot of work.

It is going to be very hard to compete with reusable UI 
components implemented in html+javascript, when they have worked 
out the quirks, due to:

1. ease of development
2. ease of modification
3. volume of UI components
4. styling know-how
5. integration
6. installed base

What you need is a reactive layer that access native data. And 
webtech provides the basic building blocks for it, thanks to the 
requirements of asm.js/pnacl.