On Monday, 20 April 2026 at 21:15:53 UTC, macasm wrote:
Hi everyone,
I have been exploring the idea of building a modern desktop UI
framework and development tooling focused on D, and I would
love to get feedback from the community.
The idea is something along these lines:
* UI described with a modern CSS-like / declarative syntax
* code written in D
* native Windows output (Win32 / potentially Direct2D)
* small binaries and fast startup
* optional VS Code extension with live preview / GUI designer
* focus on better developer experience compared to raw Win32
APIs
The main goal would be to offer something with a workflow
closer to modern frontend development, while still generating
native desktop applications.
I am trying to understand whether this would actually be useful
for D developers.
Some questions I would love feedback on:
* Would this be interesting for your projects?
* What do you currently use for desktop UI in D?
* What are the biggest pain points today?
* Would you prefer direct native Win32 generation, or a
cross-platform backend?
* How important would live preview / visual designer tooling be?
I would really appreciate honest feedback from people actively
using D for desktop or tooling projects.
Well, in the end you said that you prefer feedback for people
actively using D for desktop, and I'm NOT one of them so take
this with a grain of salty.
The idea is interesting, but see back in the day (More than 10
years) when I was writing things for Desktop I would just look
for anything that was cross-platform, and in that era I used to
use GTK-D, but it was a hassle to test and then I went to
browsers, it was somehow easier to work than native Desktop and I
never looked back, for my games even my Map editors was written
for web and even with browsers wars going on, it used to work
pretty much the same on FF, chromium and safari. Sometimes I
would need to add something for one browser or another but after
that it was OK. It was better and faster than deploy new native
application.
It is nice to test my old projects from 2013 see them still
running.
Just another thing for you to think about, here where I live
there was a time with Desktop Apps (Developed with Delphi), but
from about the same time (10 years ago), web got stronger and
most of time was to port the "old" Desktop to web, currently
working in a big health care the apps are pretty much web apps.
Like I said I'm probably not your end user, just passing my
thoughts.
Answering some of your questions:
* What are the biggest pain points today?
For me before AI it used to be when porting a pre-existed Desktop
app to Web from a given GUI. Now with AI this got easier, so an
idea (if this is not a thing today) having a GUI that generate
HTML5 GUI without any extra steps. I know some compilers that
generate WASM and so on. Like I said in another topic, where I
work they ported a +20 years old native app to the web just like
that, it mimics the same look 'n feel with Ai.
* Would you prefer direct native Win32 generation, or a
cross-platform backend?
Like I said above, if I were to use one (Very hard to happen), I
would choose one with cross-platform, from the start I'm Linux
user. =]
Please don't take what I said as a discourage, If you create
something I wish you success and please tell us later about.
Matheus.
