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

[Israel Matos]

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, that would be interesting for the language itself and 
easier to integrate with D code. We could focus on Win32 and make 
it elegant and all. But that means a massive effort from our 
community.

There's already a ton of non-D software out there with minimal 
overhead that does exactly this. Even Java comes already with GUI 
libs and awesome abstractions that can make switching GUIs as 
easy as a switch in flags. You can go from Swing to JavaFX in a 
second with almost no overhead.

But we can try making something like Tauri which uses the OS 
default webview (so it doesnt need to ship an entire browser like 
Electron does)  and is very minimal and can be implemented 
without making everything from scratch and you get all the 
benefits of cross-platform too.

Cross-platform software is much better and I think it makes more 
sense as it makes it easier to get an actual user base, since the 
service is more important than which GUI library you used. End 
users dont care if we used D, C++ or Java for this. All the users 
do is install, run and occasionally break the software, we fix 
it, and the cycle repeats.

I. M.