[ot] D and graphics on Linux

[Georg Wrede]

John Demme wrote:
> Georg Wrede wrote:
> 
>>Slightly off-topic, but:
>>
>>I may be in a position to make the first Processing Plant Production
>>Line Control Software in D. To my knowledge, at least. :-)
>>
>>That would include, among other things, a display of some of the vital
>>parameters of the process as real-time graphs. (Temperatures, wattages,
>>production speed, etc.)
>>
>>The choice of language and operating system is mine, and being a D
>>bigot, I really would like to do the stuff in D. And Windows is excluded
>>because the plant can't afford an unstable OS for 24/7 operation. Since
>>D is (more or less) a Win/Lin language, it'll be Linux.
>>
>>Now, being a pay-project, I need to find a productive choice of
>>libraries and tools to maximise Productivity. (Specified as man-hours to
>>delivery.)
>>
>>The graphs will be on X (as opposed to Linux console graphics), so that
>>they can be viewed off-shopfloor too.
>>
>>Does anybody have experience on this kind of stuff?
> 
> There's Ant's D OO frontend for GTK, but I've found it to be pretty
> incomplete.
> 
> I ported the GTK headers to D some time ago (they're close to correct) and
> they're on dsource.org... I'd recommend using GTK and the GTK headers, this
> way you can use all the existing GTK stuff. 

Yes, this has been one of the alternatives.

> I also posted headers for
> Glade, which allows you to design the UI graphically, save it to an XML
> format, and load the UI from the XML when the program loads.  It's pretty
> cool, but it's another library you need.

This would save a lot of time, I think.

> Alternatively, Glade can generate
> C code to create your interface, and since D works with C.... 

I'd like to do as much as possible in D. But this has been an 
alternative too.

> I haven't
> made any attempts as using Qt since Qt is c++ based, whereas GTK is pure C.

Yeah, besides, being a pay-project, I don't even know if Qt would be ok.

> There's also a D header for ncurses, but I haven't used it.

Character-block graphics might even be sufficient, but then the users 
and managers would look down on it. (This is just so typical!)

> Personally, I don't like GUI programming in D (it's only slightly better in
> Java.)  I'm waiting for full shared object support so we can integrate D
> with python and I can write the GUI stuff in python and everything else in
> D.

Yeah, there's so much drudgery and so little interesting things. Ideally 
a RAD system (Kylix comes to mind, a vast choice Java IDEs, etc) would 
be the smart thing to use here, but "I wanna do it in D".