Current state of GUI's

Rikki Cattermole via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Thu Sep 3 08:41:31 PDT 2015


On 04/09/15 3:37 AM, motaito wrote:
> On Thursday, 3 September 2015 at 15:26:45 UTC, Rikki Cattermole wrote:
>> On 04/09/15 3:15 AM, motaito wrote:
>>> 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.
>>
>> Thanks, this is a long term thing. I've been planning this for ~2
>> years. Previous was Devisualization (Github org of mine). So a bunch
>> of code has actually originated here. Before that DOOGLE. Even some of
>> that came from OOGL (ported it from c++ to D as D_OOGL).
>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> Because, at best case the graphics could be very ugly and lacking of
>> features in a GUI toolkit. We're just too far away from it.
>>
>> We need to focus on getting the core problems solved. So that people
>> can flourish with building e.g. GUI toolkits unimpeded by what we
>> support. Also helps interop between them.
>>
>> After we have a decent one, then we can consider it for Phobos.
>> I know the current situation is unfortunate. We've had some pretty
>> major changes in the last few years and that is ok. I hope we do get
>> to a point where it is easy to get started in almost any problem
>> domain :)
>
> Again Thanks for the details. It's very much appreciated. From a
> usability stand point for alphaPhobos. Are you more going into the
> direction of WPF or QML, using a declaration file or more along the
> lines of a QWidget, building the GUI through instantiating objects
> inside a D-module?

Neither, I'm not touching GUI's itself. Only the creation of a window 
and a context.

GUI's are far too controversial and for good reason. They are next to 
impossible to do properly. But that is not a popular opinion :p

Here is more or less what I'm planning on supporting: 
https://github.com/rikkimax/alphaPhobos/blob/master/source/std/experimental/ui/window/defs.d
There is a bunch of optional features you will notice in other files. 
Such as a menu, notifications and even screenshots.


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