On Friday, 25 September 2015 at 08:45:08 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
On Friday, 25 September 2015 at 04:18:44 UTC, Kapps wrote:
On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 22:20:35 UTC, Meta wrote:
On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 19:28:00 UTC, Ola Fosheim
Grøstad wrote:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/interactive-the-top-programming-languages-2015
They list D as useful for web development and embedded, but
not desktop apps... And they list Rust was useful for desktop
apps and web development. Something's fishy here.
I don't really disagree about D not being so useful for
desktop apps, thanks to the GUI situation.
Does C fare better here (listed for desktop development)?
Well, gnome is written entirely in C AFAIK, so it's definitely
possible to write full-scale desktop applications in C without
C++. But off the top of my head, I don't know of any C GUI
toolkits other than GTK. All the rest are C++. And honestly, I
don't understand why anyone would write large applications in C
instead of C++, but there are definitely folks that prefer to do
that.
So, I'd say that C fares better than D in that GTK is written for
it, whereas D has to have bindings to it (though that should be
pretty straightforward, if tedious, and gtkd does exist), so C is
a bit ahead but not necessarily by bunch. C++ obviously does
_far_ better at this point. But it's a _huge_ undertaking to even
write usable bindings to a C++ GUI library, let alone write your
own GUI toolkit in D (which would be truly fantastic but is
pretty unrealistic at this point for anything non-trivial). And
the projects which have tried to write bindings/wrappers for C++
GUI toolkits have generally not had enough folks working on them
to actually succeed. I'm sure that we'll get there at some point,
but it takes a lot of manpower, and that's something that we tend
to be lacking.
From what I've heard, I'd guess that DWT was the most mature way
to write a GUI in D, but I've never used it, and I'm not a huge
fan of the idea of using a Java-centric library or framework, and
SWT uses GTK for its backend on Linux, and I hate the look of
GTK. So, I wouldn't be in a big hurry to use DWT, but I'd
strongly suggest that anyone seriously looking at writing a GUI
application in D take a look at it.
If I were going to write a full-scale GUI app in D, I'd probably
either use DWT or write the GUI portion in C++ with Qt and use D
for the backend. But hopefully by the time I get around to
writing any GUIs with D, the situation will have improved. There
are definitely folks who _want_ the situation to improve, but we
need enough folks working on solutions in a coordinated manner to
actually succeed. And I get the impression that most D libraries
thus far which have gone anywhere have been written by individual
developers, which is unlikely to work for a GUI toolkit. For
instance, Aurora was a great project idea (though not a GUI
toolkit per se), and it seems to have pretty much died, because
Adam failed to get much of anyone else to help him with it.
Similarly, as I understand it, QtD died, because there weren't a
lot of developers working on it, and those that were got tired of
it.
- Jonathan M Davis
