Would a modern native desktop UI framework and VS Code designer be interesting for the D community?

[matheus]

On Monday, 20 April 2026 at 21:15:53 UTC, macasm wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I have been exploring the idea of building a modern desktop UI 
> framework and development tooling focused on D, and I would 
> love to get feedback from the community.
>
> The idea is something along these lines:
>
> * UI described with a modern CSS-like / declarative syntax
> * code written in D
> * native Windows output (Win32 / potentially Direct2D)
> * small binaries and fast startup
> * optional VS Code extension with live preview / GUI designer
> * focus on better developer experience compared to raw Win32 
> APIs
>
> The main goal would be to offer something with a workflow 
> closer to modern frontend development, while still generating 
> native desktop applications.
>
> I am trying to understand whether this would actually be useful 
> for D developers.
>
> Some questions I would love feedback on:
>
> * Would this be interesting for your projects?
> * What do you currently use for desktop UI in D?
> * What are the biggest pain points today?
> * Would you prefer direct native Win32 generation, or a 
> cross-platform backend?
> * How important would live preview / visual designer tooling be?
>
> I would really appreciate honest feedback from people actively 
> using D for desktop or tooling projects.

Well, in the end you said that you prefer feedback for people 
actively using D for desktop, and I'm NOT one of them so take 
this with a grain of salty.

The idea is interesting, but see back in the day (More than 10 
years) when I was writing things for Desktop I would just look 
for anything that was cross-platform, and in that era I used to 
use GTK-D, but it was a hassle to test and then I went to 
browsers, it was somehow easier to work than native Desktop and I 
never looked back, for my games even my Map editors was written 
for web and even with browsers wars going on, it used to work 
pretty much the same on FF, chromium and safari. Sometimes I 
would need to add something for one browser or another but after 
that it was OK. It was better and faster than deploy new native 
application.

It is nice to test my old projects from 2013 see them still 
running.

Just another thing for you to think about, here where I live 
there was a time with Desktop Apps (Developed with Delphi), but 
from about the same time (10 years ago), web got stronger and 
most of time was to port the "old" Desktop to web, currently 
working in a big health care the apps are pretty much web apps.

Like I said I'm probably not your end user, just passing my 
thoughts.

Answering some of your questions:

> * What are the biggest pain points today?

For me before AI it used to be when porting a pre-existed Desktop 
app to Web from a given GUI. Now with AI this got easier, so an 
idea (if this is not a thing today) having a GUI that generate 
HTML5 GUI without any extra steps. I know some compilers that 
generate WASM and so on. Like I said in another topic, where I 
work they ported a +20 years old native app to the web just like 
that, it mimics the same look 'n feel with Ai.

> * Would you prefer direct native Win32 generation, or a 
> cross-platform backend?

Like I said above, if I were to use one (Very hard to happen), I 
would choose one with cross-platform, from the start I'm Linux 
user. =]

Please don't take what I said as a discourage, If you create 
something I wish you success and please tell us later about.

Matheus.