What Features Should A GUI toolkit have?

[Baz via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 6 March 2015 at 06:02:17 UTC, Taylor Hillegeist wrote:
> So I have played with a few GUI libraries with bindings 
> available through D. Personally I find that it seems like there 
> is alot of effort being put forth on GUI projects.
>
> It is my experience that most project's fail or die, not 
> because of lack of effort but lack of specification, many 
> people start projects thinking, can i make it do this? how 
> about this? and a project is born! but soon interest is lost 
> and the project dies. But specification can lead to projects 
> that become useful earlier, more stable, and live longer 
> happier lives.
>
> At this point i think the following features are the most 
> useful.
>
> -Ease of setup-
> dub integration is awesome, without it things are more 
> difficult. This has very little to do with the actual toolkit.
>
> -Minimal dependencies-
> Personally If i can statically link a toolkit to my GUI and it 
> has zero dependencies outside of the OS typically install. I am 
> very happy. really the less that can be messed with the better.
>
> best in my opinion: DWT MiniGUI DGUI at least for windows.
>
> -Rock Solid Stable-
> So when I do the hello world application I resize the window 
> push the buttons and do pretty normal things. But on some 
> libraries I get weird stuff going on sometimes the window even 
> becomes invisible..... scary.
>
> best in my opinion: GTKD TKD
>
> -GUI EDITOR/BUILDER-
> Good- You can edit a static layout
> Better- you can edit a layout and re-size the window layout 
> responds
> Best- you can edit the actual window in real time without 
> recompile.
>
> Good- You have a pallet of basic widgets that you can place.
> Better- You have a pallet of basic widgets + custom widgets 
> that you can edit.
> Best- You have the above + a database were people can share 
> widgets :)
>
> -Widgets-
> Personally I think that all layout items like HBar should be 
> children of widget that way i can make more modular component, 
> but that's just my opinion.
>
> -Data Binding-
> Most of the time I use that data a widget represents and much 
> less often the events they produce.
>
> -Ease of Use-
> Your tookits should work for you... not the other way round.
>
> -layout-
> I have seen some schemes like Winforms Dock,javaFX HBar, 
> HTML5's float/static/absolute/realitive... Idk what seems the 
> most freindly... HTML5/css seems the most complex. I have a 
> dream H/VBar + align/distribution/wrap options.
>
> I know some of these are RAD things. I don't have an opinion on 
> thread safe guis. personally I would like to see a GUI tookit 
> that the community said... use X it is just the way to go for 
> most things.

Click-able buttons A GUI toolkit should have...Click-able buttons 
rocks !

More seriously, one of the problem which explains why there no 
well-established GUI library around is the lack of serialization, 
component streaming solution. Currently there is no standard way 
in D to save and reload a class instance or a struct.