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

[Jim Hewes]

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.

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'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