Qt bindings for D

[Max Samukha]

On Monday, 14 October 2013 at 09:45:18 UTC, Abdulhaq wrote:
>>
>> I recommend to dump it and start from scratch. A clang-based 
>> generator would be an interesting option to explore. Or, if 
>> you want to preserve your sanity, just write Qt applications 
>> in C++/QML.
>
> Hi Max, so why dump it? I can see a few reasons why you might
> propose that:
>
> 1) You think it's a dead end because QtJambi is dead, so it 
> would
> be problematic to move it forward with new versions of Qt

That is one reason. Also, QtJambi is based on a limited and 
outdated C++ parser, and we had problems getting necessary 
information from it. When Qt moves to C++11, the situation will 
get worse. So I think it is reasonable to switch to clang soon.

> 2) There are some problems with the architecture of the binding
> that you're aware of that would prevent it from working reliably
>
> For (1), I think even only having 4.8 is still a real asset. I
> don't know the code base really well (but spent a fair amount of
> time with it, and know the PyQt technology fairly well too) so
> can't speak to (2) but if you had specific concerns it would be
> very interesting to know what they were.
>
> From my testing it seems to me that a lot is working, enough to
> write useful GUIs in it - tell me what I'm missing (a lot, I
> know, but is anything really fatally flawed)?

Well, you can use the bindings for simple short-living utilities 
if you don't mind occasional memory leaks and crashes.

Long story short, D allows for two approaches to bindings like 
QtD:

1. The traditional one is to allocate "shells" on GC heap and 
have a set of manually specified rules for ownership transfers 
and reference count adjustments.
2. The other is more interesting - abandon the idea of 
reference/ownership annotations and go with semi-automatic memory 
management as it is in Qt, with no reliance on the GC.

At some point I wanted to switch to 2 completely, so QtD is 
somewhere between 1 and 2, quite a mess.