D Binding to GUI libraries

[Patrick Schluter]

On Sunday, 21 October 2018 at 18:24:30 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2018-10-21 19:29, Russel Winder wrote:
>
>> But who apart from Eclipse and JetBrains uses Java for desktop 
>> GUI
>> applications?
>
> There's probably a ton of business/enterprise applications that 
> are written in Java.
>
> But I don't care for that, that's why I'm using D :)
>
>> I do not have Eclipse to check, but the JetBrains IDEs
>> (at least CLion, GoLand, IntelliJ IDEA, and PyCharm) ship 
>> Swing, SWT,
>> and JavaFX in their systems.
>
> Not sure what you mean with "ship" here. Swing and JavaFX are 
> shipped with Java.
>
> Eclipse itself is built using SWT.
>
>> Swing, and I believe SWT, have somewhat old architectures for 
>> GUI
>> frameworks where GTK+, Qt, and wxWidgets have moved on. But 
>> this may
>> just be opinion rather than agreed "fact".
>
> I haven't use these other frameworks so I don't know what's 
> consider old architecture and modern architecture.
>
>> Apart from GtkD on GTK+ systems
>
> Linux doesn't have a "native" GUI in the same sense as macOS 
> and Windows.
>
> , and dqml, QtE5, qtD, and dqt on Qt,
>> and wxD on wxWidgets. Qt and wxWidgets pride themselves on 
>> being able
>> to use native frameworks underneath – I have no personal 
>> evidence as I
>> only use GNOME, I am not a good data point.
>
> Qt is not native, at least not on macOS. Are any of the Qt D 
> bindings actually useful? wxD seems very old, D1 old, is that 
> useable?
>
> When I said that DWT is basically the only native D toolkit, I 
> failed to also include: up to date (as in working with the 
> latest compiler), working and cross-platform.

I like it and I'm looking forward that it gets beyond swt 3.4.
I ported my Java GUI SWT program to D and it was a breeze to do. 
I didn't even require to change the structure of the app and the 
class hierarchy. There was only the file and string handling that 
I had to change, in fact make so much more readable and efficient.
There were some difficulties because of compiler issues in 
version 2.7x, but those were resolved and everything went smooth 
after that.