What library functionality would you most like to see in D?

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2011-07-31 21:06, Jim Hewes wrote:
> On 7/31/2011 3:01 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>>
>> I personally would like to see DWT (GUI library,
>> http://dsource.org/projects/dwt) in a more finished state. These are
>> things that need work:
>>
>> * Finishing the Mac OS X port
>> * Update to later SWT versions
>> * Fixing bugs
>> * Port to 64bit
>>
>> Any help is much appreciated. Currently DWT is a low priority for me.
>>
>
> I agree with this one. I'll tell you why, hopefully without getting too
> long-winded. :-) I've just been a lurker here and although I like the D
> language haven't really used it seriously yet.
>
> Where I work, we use Visual Studio C++ for the main product. It's highly
> unlikely that would just get switch to using D. But we also write
> various small utilities and test programs that we use internally. These
> are almost all written in C++ with MFC. I have never been a fan of MFC.
> (Even from the beginning I preferred Borland's ObjectWindows.) But it
> has some advantages. It's a common, almost standard GUI that comes with
> VS and to some extent is integrated with VS. Using MFC I can produce
> single-file EXEs with a GUI that can be easily passed around the company
> internally. I can tell users to just grab one EXE, copy it to your
> computer and run it. Very easy for people. My point here is that these
> little applications are not critical and so they could be written in any
> language. In my company, this would be the best way for a new language
> to make inroads. I've written one or two utility apps in C# and haven't
> had any complaints.

That's understandable.

> For my job I work on Windows, though I try not to be an O/S fanboy and
> try to treat all platforms with equal credibility. But I guess one of my
> peeves about open source and Linux (which seem to go together) is that
> for any target goal there are a hundred half-finished, abandoned
> projects. I assume this is because people don't get paid to do it and so
> once they get tired of it they move on to other more interesting things.
> I can't depend on that or sell it to my colleagues. Take a look at the
> GUI page on the D wiki. There are a lot of projects, but almost all of
> them seem to be either in alpha or beta stage or are abandoned. Further,
> in every project, each developer usually chose to use some different
> array of tools that I need to download and install in my computer just
> to build his project. This gets kind of annoying on Windows.

I fully agree with that and it's annoying. The wiki page could probably 
use some cleanup. About the tools, I'm working on a package manager for 
D that will ease installation of D libraries, tools and application. I 
and at least one other person is working on a build tool with the hope 
that we can all agree on one standard built tool for D.

> I've recently downloaded the QtD binding to take a look because Qt seem
> to be a pretty popular cross-platform library. I was able to build it
> and then also build a couple of the sample projects, although I haven't
> really spent time with it beyond that. It seems that not only is a Hello
> World program a 1.7MB executable, but I think I would also need to
> distribute the libcpp_core.dll and libcpp_gui.dll files with it for a
> total of about 17MB. QtD looks like a lot of good work and I don't mean
> to knock it here. I just mean to say that in contrast what would be nice
> is a “standard” GUI written in D that could be statically linked and
> would be not too large. I confess I have not tried the existing DWT yet,
> mostly since I just didn't want to also download Tango.
>
> Jim

DWT works with D2 (Phobos) as well. It's statically linked so the hello 
world application gets quite large. But that's because it pulls in a lot 
of the library, meaning even if you start using other parts of the 
library it won't increase the size of the executable at the same rate.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg