D Binding to GUI libraries

[Paolo Invernizzi]

On Saturday, 20 October 2018 at 14:24:56 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Sat, 2018-10-20 at 12:43 +0000, tide via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> 
> […]
>> I mean it *may* work, but that isn't the problem if the 
>> developers completely lack support for the platform. I can 
>> download Qt with prebuilt libraries and it works out of the 
>> box with MSVC. There's an obvious difference between the two 
>> developers support. As someone else said GTK look like ass on 
>> Windows, Qt is really the only crossplatform GUI API written 
>> in a native-compile-able language out there that gets most 
>> things right.
>
> I do not disagree, especially about GTK+ not really being 
> available on Windows and macOS, it is fundamentally a Linux and 
> UNIX framework – I think we can ignore the fact that macOS is 
> sort of FreeBSD in this circumstance due to macOS.
>
> I'd agree Qt is a much better cross-platform GUI framework that 
> GTK+. I've use it with Python very successfully – originally 
> with PySide, then PyQt, but now back with PySide2. I tried QML 
> with Go to move to native code from Python, but it didn't 
> really work for me as yet, though some people gave me a few 
> tips a few weeks back that I haven't followed up on as yet.
>
> wxWidgets seems still to be going though and wxPython is rising 
> as a phoenix . I haven't really used them though but maybe the 
> latest version is worth a whirl.
>
> I guess people doing Qt stuff really do work with C++ if they 
> don't work with Python? I'd call this an opportunity for D. The 
> trick has to be to automate the creation of the binding. I have 
> to admit I do not know what the technique is for PySide2 but 
> PyQt certainly has a system for generation of the binding.
>
> Of course, Rust  https://github.com/rust-qt

As a company that will be hosted in the QT booth at SPS IPC 
Drives 2018 in Nuremberg at the end of November, C++ dominates.

We are calling a little D codebase from a QT application, but 
just to leverage some legacy old code.

I've used PySide, years ago, but nowadays the performance of the 
C++ compilers, and the agility of QT Creator are closing the 
bridge for a fast edit/compile/test cycle... the big advantage of 
PySide is the tremendous amount of python libraries that you can 
use in your application.

Said that, we are using QML, but I don't love it a lot...

- Paolo