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

[Adam D. Ruppe]

On Monday, 20 April 2026 at 21:15:53 UTC, macasm wrote:
> * Would this be interesting for your projects?

I've never really understood what benefits the "modern" approach 
bring. I've experimented with some things but the `new Class(x)` 
keeps ended up good enough.

> * What do you currently use for desktop UI in D?

my minigui.d

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

My approach was "both": using standard controls gives a lot of 
benefits since tons of little things just work, but then you 
might also want to use other operating systems.

I spend far more time on little interaction stuff than the 
backend. Like drawing is trivial, but then you want clipboard and 
drag and drop and context menus and once all that's there, you 
want click and drag to scroll the right way as you select, you 
want keyboard shortcuts..... just tons of little things.

When you use the standard Windows control, most of that just 
works so there's a lot of value there. But then there's things 
that don't have standard Windows controls, hence me doing both.

> * How important would live preview / visual designer tooling be?

I've never felt the need for it, it is easier to express things 
in code and just do a quick recompile to see it.