The State of the GUI

[Gary Willoughby]

On Wednesday, 24 October 2018 at 06:20:05 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
> As a result I've done some fairly extensive research over the 
> years on, not just the effort required to bring one to D, but 
> also on what people are actually using.

How? I'm the author of a native UI toolkit and I've no idea how 
many people are using it. But I know a lot of people are though. 
Most people will never tell you they use your stuff.

https://github.com/nomad-software/tkd

> At this point in time HTML/CSS/JS is by far the most prevalent 
> UX toolkit in use today and not a single modern website uses 
> the native widget theme. The bare minimum is Bootstrap.

I disagree and this is impossible to measure. Don't confuse web 
with native both have use-cases.

> I've never used GTK or QT, but my understanding is that both 
> have retrofitted some amount of theming into their toolkits but 
> neither approach the capabilities of WPF or HTML/CSS.

I would have thought this would have been included in any 
'research' you've done?

> There are other reasons that native toolkits died however.

What? Native toolkits haven't died.

> Native toolkits are a dead-end. The future of non-Web UX is 
> non-native.

I think this is more of an opinion than concrete fact.

> And that brings us to the final problem with UX in D. The 
> amount of time it takes to bring any UX toolkit into D is...

It took me 6+ months (part-time) for the above linked toolkit. 
You just need dedicated hard work.

> I firmly believe that a non-native, cross-platform, UX library 
> will open D up to a whole new market of users that are 
> desperate for something better than what they have now.

I don't believe this at all. We just need better documentation 
for the native libraries we have available.