The State of the GUI

[Guillaume Piolat]

On Thursday, 25 October 2018 at 09:14:08 UTC, Basile B. wrote:
> On Thursday, 25 October 2018 at 08:13:38 UTC, rikki cattermole 
> wrote:
>> On 25/10/2018 9:06 PM, Adam Wilson wrote:
>>> There is absolutely no reason that a D based non-native 
>>> toolkit could not be used to mimic the native theme at a 
>>> pixel level. WPF does it, so we *know* it can be done. Easy, 
>>> no. Possible, absolutely. :)
>>
>> We can do better than just the visual attributes. Hook in the 
>> accessibility API's of the platform and we'd be significantly 
>> better off than libraries like nuklear or imgui. But first, we 
>> have to decide to actually engineer a solution and not just 
>> hack one together like dlangui.
>
> People needs to work together, forget their little person, make 
> concessions.
> "Cool kids" have begun to build desktop apps using web 
> technologies, that's imo impossible to accept. We need to stop 
> being some stupid / classic asocial system programmers.
>
> I'm part of the many who tried to build his own little GUI 
> framework and finally gave up because a GUI framework requires 
> many knowledge in many domain (i.e you want to to work on a GUI 
> but you have to loose your time on learning how clipboard works 
> on X...). It's time to move on. When you'll have finished the 
> core (windowing, message loop) it will be time to build 
> something serious on top. I think that something like the 
> Lazarus widgetset system may work.
>
> People just need to start working together. Talents are here 
> but fragmented.

I also have homemade UI widgets and windowing and now need a CSS 
equivalent! This story is familiar it sounds. I don't think it 
will be easy to serve many use cases but it's probably worth it 
to try.

I'll gladly participate in such a work-group (wherever it is on 
Github) and can provide some native Cocoa backend help (amongst 
other), preferably if led with a top-down vision by Adam Wilson 
(yup). I think enough people around here can deal with the 
bottom-up aspects of such an endeavour.

Btw I agree with the assessment that CSS+HTML is where it's at 
currently. It's not that it's best but browsers are about the 
only thing that can display multi-lingual text correctly.