Is UI interesting for us?

[GrimMaple]

On Wednesday, 29 March 2023 at 09:54:35 UTC, Dadoum wrote:
> On Wednesday, 29 March 2023 at 09:14:55 UTC, GrimMaple wrote:
>> DLangUI does almost all of that. But people aren't interested 
>> in commiting. They are interested in startig from scratch over 
>> and over again instead.
>
> I tried to use DlangUI to potentially contribute to it. But 
> there are some design choices that turned me off personally.
>
> The API is very inspired of Android UI, which makes it very 
> verbose with explicit layouts (I have a GTK+ background, so I 
> struggle to understand how layouts work in general).
>
> The UI is usually built with a custom format in a string, so if 
> it has an error you will have to wait for the code to compile 
> and run to see it.
>
> Backends are made of one big file, and I didn't understand how 
> you can add one (I wanted Wayland support).
>
> Renderers are also inside each backend, so adding support for 
> Vulkan would probably imply adding more duplicated code in 
> every backend or move some code in a new module.
>
> Before last year, there was nobody to help me figure out how 
> everything works so I gave up and started my own thing, but I 
> would love to help and improve the project now.

There are countless issues with dlangui, but so far it was the 
most pleasent experience of writing real-life GUI applications in 
D. My nearest example is 
https://github.com/GrimMaple/mwverify/blob/main/source/app.d , a 
fully functional UI app in 65 LOC with no external dependencies 
(only system deps on Windows and Linux). I also think DLangUI 
needs a lot of refactoring to extract as much stuff into separate 
modules as possible. Contributions are welcome, I usually review 
them as soon a I have free time.