Dcanvas, a fork of DlangUI

[c-smile]

On Sunday, 24 May 2026 at 18:49:09 UTC, Dejan Lekic wrote:

> No, it is not. Here are some platforms where it is not 
> available or is very hard to properly build and use:
>
> - Secure Web Environments (where WebGL/WebGPU are blocked)

Not sure I understand how Skia is related to Web environments. 
And how is WebGL/WebGPU is related to it. AFAIR Skia may render 
on native WebGPU. But that just one of possible backends it 
supports. It can rasterize stuff on plain bitmap (CPU) and that's 
pretty secure.

> - visionOS (Apple Vision Pro)
> - PlayStation 5 / Xbox Series consoles
> - watchOS (Apple Watch)
> - RTOS / Microcontrollers (FreeRTOS, Zephyr)

In this discussion we are talking about desktop UI primarily. And 
these aren't them.
On such devices (IoT) there are other options, like NanoVG that 
is pretty adequate and small.

> However, considering the limited scope of the DlangUI, skia 
> could be a good choice.

It is a good choice for GPU accelerated rasterization.

But for UI it requires specific infrastructure: DOM, set of 
input/reusable widgets, event wiring, accessibility, layout 
managers, styling/branding... Many things to be short.

>
> D has good choices for GUI applications, one of them is giD: 
> https://github.com/Kymorphia/gid . Some [really good 
> applications](https://github.com/Kymorphia/gid#gid-applications) are made with it...

giD is an option on very small (I would even say marginal) set of 
targets: only on Linux'es that run GTK based desktop managers. 
Like Ubuntu, but not Kubuntu, etc.

At the moment D has ABSOLUTELY no options for modern UI. On 
largest desktop platform (Windows) there is a semi-option to use 
Win32 API but most of MS apps are using now UWP/WinUI that D 
simply has no idea about.

Really, the only cross-platform and modern UI option now is my 
Sciter/D. Sciter is proven to handle UI since 2007 and on 460 mln 
machines (as UI layer of various apps).