Java > Scala

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, December 02, 2011 14:57:56 Walter Bright wrote:
> >> It's not just the code involved. It's the tutorials, web sites,
> >> manuals,
> >> support, etc., that would have to be reinvented. By developing a D
> >> interface to an existing one, none of that has to be developed.
> > 
> > This is too true. But if it was easy, everybody would be doing it. You
> > could say the same thing about compilers, but that didn't stop you ...
> > :-)
> Frankly, I think a compiler is much easier to build.

I'd have to agree on that one. Compilers are much more straightforward than 
GUI toolkits - given all of the crazy, non-deterministic interactions that you 
have to deal with in GUIs.

Compilers are by no means easy to write - especially with regards to the 
optimizer and error handling - but they're much more straightforward IMHO.

As for GUIs written in D, we just don't have the manpower for doing that at 
this point. There's no reason why it couldn't be done or shouldn't be done 
eventually, but that's a _huge_ task, and we get most of the gain by simply 
making it possible to interact well with existing C/C++ GUI toolkits in D - 
even that is a _lot_ of work. So, while it would be fantastic to have a solid 
GUI toolkit written in D, doing it in the short term doesn't really make much 
sense IMHO, and there are so many people already pouring thousands of hours 
into existing, mature, C/C++ GUI toolkits, that I think that we'd be remiss to 
not take advantage of that through D's interopability with C/C++. But I 
certainly have no problem with us having a D-based GUI toolkit in the long 
term. It's the short term which is the problem.

- Jonathan M Davis