D is our last hope

[aberba]

On Monday, 18 December 2023 at 15:14:51 UTC, Hors wrote:
> On Monday, 18 December 2023 at 14:08:19 UTC, bachmeier wrote:

>
> GrimMaple is the author of dlangui, and talking about why 
> writing libraries in D is not a good experience.

Seems you're quite relatively new here. DlangUI was authored by 
someone else. It doesn't look like it changed much since. But I'm 
glad he's keeping it alive. DlangUI is packed with features. If I 
had a $1m to spend on D, that's where it would go.

Its become obvious to me that a lot of D devs don't have interest 
in GUI apps, at least the kind that some would call a "real app". 
Those that do, know D enough to interop with C or c++ to use one 
of those toolkits. It could explain why projects like DlangUI, 
beamUI, and the others that got halfway there all didn't gain 
much adoption. You could argue none of them became stable enough 
to use. GUI toolkits are hard for an individual from what I 
understand.

With that said, we have...

* arsd.mingui by Adam which surprisingly is packed although it 
doesn't look pretty on Linux 😅

* gtk-d which I personally like since its native to Linux and can 
be styled to look great on Windows too.
![CSS styling 
gtkd](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aberba/pos/master/screenshot.jpg?token=GHSAT0AAAAAACLTJEBLA7OGOIXBDEKYMRBEZMAXJRA)


D seems to be more popular for tooling, server-side web dev, and 
non-gui uses. I personally curious to know how people use D now. 
I haven't been active for the past 3yrs lol.

>
> Another comment by GrimMaple:
>
>> And it's not like building tools/3rd party for D is a good 
>> idea anyway. Since the language can't decide what it wants to 
>> be, and you end up having to either overengineer your code, 
>> either listen to a lot of complaints how your code is 
>> unsupported in certain cases.
>
> GrimMaple here again talks about why writing libraries in D is 
> not a good experience.
> If you want developers to use and write libraries for your 
> language, you need to have something good and stable to offer 
> them.


GrimMaple seems like me from 4 yrs ago complaining about what I 
thought D needed to be lol. I've since moved on to contributing 
my fair share to increase adoption.