D "Swing"

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2012-12-24 13:59, Chris wrote:

> But there will always be the issue of "feature not yet supported

I don't see how your approach would be any difference. "Hey, the Win32 
API has support for a calender widget, why doesn't the standard D GUI 
support that".

> and bugs are introduced when the same code is run on a higher version of a
> given os. And it may take a while to fix it, i.e. to know what has
> changed in the new version etc. Native bindings are a never ending
> story.

The same thing can happen with a non-native GUI as well. You need to use 
some kind of functionality to draw the GUI somewhere.

> I have worked with some native-binding framworks and there is
> always an issue (maybe even a bug in the native os).

It's sounds like your suggesting that a non-native approach wouldn't 
have any bugs. I'm sure you're not, that would be crazy.

>> I agree that it would be really nice to have a cross-platform GUI
>> framework written explicitly for D. But as you say that would be an
>> enormous task to do.
>
> Not sure. Maybe trying to catch up with and cater for at least 3
> different platforms is the bigger task in the long run.

I can assure you that what the SWT/JFace developers are doing and have 
been doing for many many years are far more time consuming than porting 
SWT to D. We would have to the same work as we're doing now, plus the 
same work as the SWT developers have been doing for, say, that last 20 
years.

Note also that DWT doesn't support nearly as many platforms as SWT does, 
and probably never will. Hmm it seems they have dropped the support for 
a couple of platforms.

> In my opinion, as D is getting ever more mature, it is about time we had
> a reliable standard cross-platform GUI. It need not be a framework like
> Swing. Maybe a more modern solution (HTML etc) would do the trick.

I don't think that would work with the D community.

> I think there is a widening gap between what you can do with D in terms of
> business logic (a lot) and what you can do with it in terms of
> connecting it to the desktop / smartphone, i.e. to the user. D has what
> it takes but languages can only take off if they have some sort of GUI
> too (cf. Objective-C after the iPhone was introduced, and app
> development in general). Sorry, that's my marketing mind speaking again.

I more than agree that D needs a GUI library, I just don't agree with 
you how it should be done.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg