the most D-ish GUI library

Karabuta via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Tue Mar 15 15:26:15 PDT 2016


On Sunday, 13 March 2016 at 22:26:48 UTC, Saša Janiška wrote:
> Hello,
>
> After long pause and trying some other languages, I've decided 
> to try
> (again) with D for writing open-source multi-platform desktop 
> (GUI)
> application.
>
> I've selected three different libraries:
>
> a) dlangui (https://github.com/buggins/dlangui
>
DlangUI has a nice API design but still need serious design and 
art work to catch up with Gtk 3.18 - 2.0 in terms of UI look and 
feel. I also find that it just have basic widgets. With Gtk you 
have Switch, Stack, Notebook, HeaderBar, and many modern input 
widgets for a modern GUI toolkit.

> b) GtkD (https://github.com/gtkd-developers/GtkD and
>
Modern as it has gone through a lot of Widget try and error for 
the past few years. Currently looks realy great(on linux) and 
more matured. It's almost like Qt built for Linux in terms of 
features :) Unfortunately being old and written in C has 
introduced some bad API design, inconsistencies and naming 
conventions which makes using it for advanced/complex stuff 
really tedious. A Projects like elementary OS have built a 
framework (granite) on top of Gtk which makes things a bit easy 
for their developers(unfortunately it can only be used in Vala 
and it's design for their desktop environment (Pantheon). 
Recently, Gtk is introducing/advancing CSS integration which 
might bring down the complexity and more customization. It 
recommended Gtk ATM if you care more about Linux.

> c) tkd (https://github.com/nomad-software/tkd)
>
Tkd works on Windows and Linux in my experience but look like 
from the 1980s - 90s. It's Look will definitely not sell when 
used for commercial (in 2016). Moreover it lacks some modern 
Widgets. However, it has IMO a really nice API design and it's 
easy for quick prototyping and it's also more stable.


I run on Linux so i would sadly go for Gtk :( whilst keeping an 
eye on DlangUI


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list