What Features Should A GUI toolkit have?

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 6 March 2015 at 12:29:46 UTC, Chris wrote:
> to!). Frankly speaking, I hate JS and wish there was a way to 
> get rid of it (please, don't try to convince me that JS is 
> somehow good - it isn't - and that there is jquery and blah dee 
> blah. Please don't.).

It isn't good, but once you figured out what to avoid, you can 
use a subset of it pretty well. Like C++ and D ;^)

It feels weird to type "Object.create(null)" to get a 
dictionary-like object, but it will probably be fixed in 
ECMAScript 6?

> worry about any platform specific quirks or pitfalls. Something 
> that is only a thin layer that is agnostic to the logic, the 
> data processing that goes on in the app. Unfortunately, the 
> only way to do this today is HTML5+JS (it's the JS bit that 
> annoys me).

Yeah, but I think if you only do the GUI (the View part of MVC) 
in JS using shadow dom it should be quite ok. And nothing should 
prevent one from generating the JS bindings from D to JS/HTML5 
from D code.

> Using technologies (other than HTML5) that interface to native 
> widgets, is not maintainable, you're always one step behind.

I agree. The alternative is to develop only for a few markets 
(e.g. iOS/Cocoa). People are also quite used to the common UI 
paradigms used on the web by now, so "learnability" is not the 
same as in the 80s/90s where regular users would be terribly 
confused when encountering innovative UI components. Text books 
on usability probably lags a bit behind there...

Qt et al might work in markets where there is little competition 
(low volume narrow markets), but I have trouble seeing a future 
for it without a major player backing it 100% to gain market 
share.

I believe Google depends on HTML5 domination to keep 
Apple/Microsoft from getting "too big".

> technologies win in this respect. And users don't care what's 
> under the hood. They simply ask "Can I download an app?". If 
> they can't, they are very annoyed.

Yep, and businesses ask for features they wanted last week. So 
time to market matters ("can you deliver this new feature within 
2-4 weeks?").