Is UI interesting for us?

[Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole]

On 25/03/2023 11:03 PM, Ikey Doherty wrote:
> Is there general interest in UI within the D community? And is there 
> enough to have our own toolkit, or would we be better placed to 
> contribute to the likes of gtk-d?

Absolutely. Many people have tried and done stuff for this.

GUI toolkits are very complex and extremely hard to get right. They are 
not something you should be doing on a whim with the intent of mass 
adoption.

Look at Adam's stuff, its pretty successful and long lasting. Yet it 
doesn't cover all the core requirements to be used by the masses (like 
UI automation for accessibility).

I've been working in some form or another since 2014 to build a fully D 
GUI toolkit and during that time I have had some success but mostly 
failures and an awful lot of iterations.

Right now I'm doing what amounts to a new standard library, -betterC, 
works with shared libraries including with dll's on Windows by dmd. It 
is incredible. It should be a very good solid base to build a GUI 
toolkit upon. It does what I view as everything right. It gets read only 
memory right with data structures for instance and should be very hard 
to get its usage wrong wrt. memory safety.

We have attempted in the past to bring us all together with the graphics 
workgroup, while that has ended, I did utilize an awful lot of the ideas 
from that into my own work.

The reason I'm going so hard on getting the underlying stuff right is 
because we've been doing the exact same thing since early in D1 days. 
Nothing has really stuck. You can see this exact same scenario playing 
out in Rust too.