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

[Anders F Björklund]

matthiasm wrote:

> 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?

Having a "lightweight" widget toolkit available for D would be a good 
thing, if it was native to D (i.e. not using C++ libs) - even better!

Currently we have two "heavyweight" widget toolkits in the making, that 
would be DWT (based on SWT / Java) and wxD (based on wxWidgets / C#).

We also have MinWin and FOX, but neither is available for Macintosh...
(unless you count running under X11, which is a bit of a cheat really)

So if FLTK was available to D (native or wrapped), that would be great!

> 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). 

Does this port require that the Windows and Carbon headers are completed 
first ? If so, we could have a slight bit of a problem there already...

FLTK itself (in C++) works good enough on Win/Mac, just wonder how easy 
it will be to port those sections over to D. Was that part of your test?

There is some movement on translating the Win32 headers, but I don't 
think the CarbonHeaders project (on Dsource) is making much progress.

I tried it earlier, but in the end just gave up and used C++ instead...

--anders