Current state of GUI's

[motaito via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 3 September 2015 at 14:13:26 UTC, Rikki Cattermole 
wrote:
> Short answer:
>
> Don't expect anything in Phobos short term.
> In the mean time you'll probably want a c/c++ library such as 
> QT.
>
>
> Long answer:
>
> We're probably about 2 years away before anything useful and 
> even then it will have a huge push back unless e.g. Andrei says 
> we must have a GUI toolkit! We've got money to make it happen.
>
> That's if my work gets into Phobos when I am planning it to 
> (unlikely).
>
> I know its grim, but keep in mind we need a platform 
> abstraction that supports things like an event loop, window 
> creation independent of what the system actually supports. An 
> image abstraction with common manipulation/formats.
>
> Then on top of a platform abstraction some people also need 
> other forms of event handling and the list goes on.
>
> But I am actively working on an image library and a window + 
> context creation library for Phobos. It's just a year away.
> https://github.com/rikkimax/alphaPhobos
>
> Not to scare you aware or anything, but you probably don't want 
> a pure Phobos solution anyway.

Thanks for the details! I was afraid, of something like this. To 
me D doesn't seam very competitive without a complete toolset :( 
Given that D has been around for a while now I am somewhat 
surprised it's not further along. I know it's a lot of work and 
not easy to do but clearly there has been a need for this for 
many years now. The resources I found were several years old (not 
including that they must have been working on it for a while 
before abandoning the project). It will be hard to compete with 
something like QT.

I was hoping for a cross platform solution that would deliver 
good performance without the complexity of c/c++. But if there is 
no built in solution QT seams a better option. I wanted to avoid 
QT because of the added complexity and the QT-windows tend to lag 
on a windows platform. This may go away with updates and bugfixes 
though.

Anyway, I hope you will be successful with alphaPhobos. I think D 
needs it, so don't abandon it! I will keep an eye out and check 
again in about a year or so. But for now I have to rethink 
whether to use D or not.

Out of curiosity, why do you think that I wouldn't want a Phobos 
solution? Wouldn't an integrated solution be better? I would not 
have to maintain a build of an external third party project, that 
may or may not be abandoned in the future, not knowing whether 
there will be updates, bugfixes or missing features to be added. 
It seams like quite a bit extra management for my project if I 
have to keep a third party project up to date and may need to 
adjust my code due to an update in an external project.