On 04/05/2011 01:41 AM, Michel Fortin wrote:
On 2011-04-04 17:27:05 -0400, Matthias Pleh <j...@konrad.net> said:
I would like to fill this gap and create a really good D GUI library
Any thoughts, comments ... ?
Just an observation...
Cross platform libraries are fine, but they generally aren't very great either.
They'll always stretch in one way or another the standard way to do things when
put on a given platform. The end result will almost always look substandard
when using that library in the environment it was not primarily designed for.
On the other hand, one thing that is missing right now, in D and in most
languages, is a standard way to display graphics. By that I mean if we had in
Phobos a module that could just open a window and let you draw things in it,
it'd make learning programming much more fun and it'd be useful for rapid
prototyping of anything that involves graphics. It doesn't need to be
complicated -- it doesn't even need to have a GUI -- just drawing things and
viewing them somewhere on a screen would be great. Later on you can add click
support, full screen mode and other features if deemed useful, but the goal
would never be provide bindings for every piece of GUI on all platforms.
So my observation is that a cross platform full-featured GUI will always fail
somewhere (mostly where those platforms differs) whereas a cross platform
drawing module with display capabilities is much more universally useful, is
more easily approachable, and is much less code to maintain.
I would love that! Actually was thinking at something like that yesterday.
An ideal design (for me) for this kind of exploratory / fun programming would
be having
* a drawing frame using most of the screen
* a minimal terminal frame down there (like in prog editors)
* a 'control' frame on the left
The control part beeing firstly for feedback on what happens in the drawing
part. Eg display range, min/max, average... when drawing a function's curve.
Then, all kinds of sophiscation (control allows input, mouse, whatever...) can
be added.
Unfortunately, I really have no idea on how to do that; else, I would have
developped it already. But I would definitely help, if possible, anyone who
knows and wants to invest time on such a project.
My uses for this would be similar to Michel's "make learning programming much
more fun and it'd be useful for rapid prototyping". Especially around toy games
/ aspects of games / samples. Having no visualisation (read: the model w/o the
view) is deeply frustrating and makes everything abstract (read: far harder).
Denis
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