Ideal D GUI Toolkit

[Adam Wilson]

On Mon, 20 May 2013 15:35:16 -0700, Brad Roberts <braddr at puremagic.com>  
wrote:

> On 5/20/13 3:08 PM, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
>> On Monday, 20 May 2013 at 22:04:06 UTC, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
>>> everyone has their own unique idea and where they disagree with each
>>> other.
>>
>> I don't even agree with myself!
>
> I've been trying to find a good point in this thread to inject my basic  
> thoughts on the subject.  This is probably the best place (and it's not  
> directly specifically at you Adam but rather the topic).
>
> I think it's a pretty huge fallacy to even consider that there can be  
> one true standardized gui toolkit.  As evidence, just look at the sheer  
> number of them that exist right now.  If you could pick a top 10 list,  
> and I think even that would be hard, there's not a clearly ahead of the  
> others champion.  There's just too many different philosophies and  
> approaches to the problem with too many competing goals.
>
> The "ideal GUI" is something that I believe can't be defined, much less  
> exist.
>
> As to re-invent vs wrap.. just consider the number of man years poured  
> into your favorite gui toolkits that already exist, and then consider  
> repeating that cost.  Aren't there a number of other projects, todo's,  
> bug fixes, etc that would benefit from even a fraction of that sort of  
> investment?
>
> My 2 cents,
> Brad
>

Brad, normally I'd agree with you because I am lazy. I hate reinventing,  
occasionally I spend more time trying to not reinvent than it would've  
taken to reinvent.

However, are we really reinventing? Yes, on a broad level it's yet another  
GUI toolkit. But the goal is WPF, not native. And to date the closest  
thing I've found is QtD, and that requires you fit the Qt ideology, it's  
not D native. But more to the point Qt is just a shadow of WPF. They are  
starting to work towards it but they've got a long way to go. D offers  
inherent advantages that can pretty dramatically speed up the process. We  
are really creating a markup based UI toolkit in native D. I don't think  
that exists. It'll can become a showcase for D and has the potential to be  
used outside of D. Because of that, I don't think it's really reinvention,  
we're using existing ideas and applying them to D.

-- 
Adam Wilson
IRC: LightBender
Project Coordinator
The Horizon Project
http://www.thehorizonproject.org/