Ideal D GUI Toolkit

[Flamaros]

On Monday, 20 May 2013 at 22:26:39 UTC, Flamaros wrote:
> With a friend/coworker we work on a prototype of a GUI system 
> like QML.
>
> QML is not native and visual aspect can't follow platform 
> specific style efficiently, but today GUI style changes often 
> and fast. Old Windows Widget style seems dying. Microsoft now 
> use Aero and Office don't looks close to old Widgets 
> applications. An other important point is that smallest devices 
> now support OpenGL
>  more and more.
>
> We choose to do something like QML because it's a relatively to 
> implement, the user have to create it's own components and give 
> a fine control of GUI behavior.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QML
>
> Techno we use :
>  - OpenGL 2.1 (to support older hardware)
>  - SDL2
>  - Lua for ui declaration (QML use a javascript engine, JIT 
> cause some issues on iOS for exemple, a move to D should be 
> great in a future)
>  - __traits to generate bindings
>  - D signals (we don't use thread for the moment)
>
> Status of "DQuick" :
> The major features actually missing in the script engine are 
> components and user defined properties to allow user to declare 
> it's own virtual types, without this it's not possible to 
> create a Button because it's not a base type.
> Property binding just works fine.
> For other part of DQuick a lot of objects are missing, like 
> State, Animation, Loader. Our item can't be loaded 
> asynchronously and for images it can be an issue.
>
> Issues :
>  - Remote desktop doesn't seems work under Windows (due to 
> OpenGL? or bad driver?)
>  - Realtime resize doesn't works (investigation need to be done)
>
>
> We may open our code when components will be implemented plus 
> the addition of a better demonstration. We are really far of a 
> production release and a schedule can't be done for the moment, 
> don't hope to much on it :-).

I forgot that we don't support text for the moment, but we'll use 
FreeType library, but we already have some experiences with it.