FLTK native in 'D'. Would that be useful?

[Dave]

matthiasm wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am one of the co-authors of FLTK. I like 'D' and as a test I have manually
> translated parts of FLTK into 
> native 'D' code. This is obvioulsy very different from just writing a wrapper,
> more involved, but also 
> more rewarding.
> 
> Before I jump into manually porting a few hundred thousand lines of code, I
> would really like to know 
> first if the 'D' community is interested in such a thing at all and if I can get
> sufficient support and a 
> reasonable number of users. 
> 
> What do you folks think?
> 
> Matthias
> 
> 
> FLTK is a Fast and Light user interface Tool Kit. It sets directly onto the low
> lever interfaces of the three 
> main supported platforms (MSWindows:WIN32, Unix including Linux: X11, Mac OS X:
> Carbon/Quartz). 
> FLTK is in use by several thousand people all over the world. It comes with a
> visual user interface 
> designer that spews out readable C++ (and after the coversion 'D').
> 
> Come check it out at http://www.fltk.org/
> 
> 


I personally think that would be great. I eval'd FLTK a while back for a 
potential project and was impressed. It is what its name implies :)

IIRC, one of the things I didn't like about it was that event handler 
callbacks could not be non-static member functions primarily because of 
an intersection of how FLTK was designed and the lack of portable 
"delegate" type functionality in C++. Conversely, I didn't like how Qt 
handles that either (with MOC and related).

With FLTK though I think the problem could be handled well with D delegates.

Ahhh, here it is: http://fltk.org/str.php?L171

IMHO, that would especially make a port worthwhile and (again, from what 
I recall about FLTK) D and FLTK seem to be made for one another <g> FLTK 
is a small static lib., fast, light, reasonably good feature set, 
modular enough to extend with new widgets, etc... Member function 
callbacks would be a great addition I think.

Be forewarned though that a port of SWT has kind-of been tagged as 
"semi-offical" but that project seems to be be stagnant right now.

A potential drawback would be if the GPL licensing wouldn't allow for 
something like a 3rd party RAD tool to distribute FLTK with it, without 
also distributing the application source (but I don't know, I'm not a 
lawyer).