What Features Should A GUI toolkit have?

[rumbu via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 6 March 2015 at 12:29:46 UTC, Chris wrote:
> HTML5 ... HTML5 ... JS ... JS.. and so on
>
> To cut a long story short, ideals and pragmatism are at 
> loggerheads here, but at the end of the day, you have to get 
> your apps out there for as many people and as many platforms as 
> possible, with the least effort possible. So HTML5 and related 
> 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. D should find a way to 
> interact with the "app world".

Microsoft already tried this by aggressively promoting 
WinJS/HTML5, hoping that they will attract the large crowd of 
HTML5/JS developers. It seems that nobody in Windows world likes 
it. Only 12% of apps from Store are developped in HTML5/JS. 8% in 
C++/XAML. 80% in C#/XAML.

Even Facebook and Google developed their own applications in 
C#/XAML. Curiously, it seems that only Microsoft is developing 
apps in WinJS/HTML5: 
http://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-8-developers-are-shunning-winjs/

In the same time, I think they learnt the lesson and they 
reactivated .net platform by open sourcing it and making it 
available also on Linux & Mac. And finally, the last .net blame 
is fading away: C# compiles directly to native code.

Anyway, it's clear for me that the age of native controls is 
history. Today interfaces are described in markup languages, the 
OS is responsible to render it, there is a clear separation 
between the user interface and the code behind.