From searching this forum I know that the question of which GUI
library to use comes up every once in a while, but I don't want
to bump old threads, especially since many of them seem to have
strayed off into quasi-philosophical discussions of whatever (as
is perfectly normal on this Internet).

I am an OS X user and pretty much beginner in D who wants to
write a simple application with a GUI. I know that GtkD is the
most stable cross-platform GUI library out there, but for
whatever reason after a full day of doing all sorts of things
with it I can't get it to work on my Mac. I was going to post a
question on the GtkD forums, but seeing that the latest post on
there was from May of last year discouraged me from doing that.

QtD seems to have been abandoned. Most other libraries either
have little support for OS X (it seems that OS X users of D are
practically non-existent, which I suppose is too bad for me), or
have been left to wither away, too.

Is there a more or less stable GUI library with decent support
for OS X, with good documentation and/or examples *in D* (that
is, not C, C++, or Java)?

Thanks.

Dammit, I meant to post this to D.learn. Oh well.

On Friday, 14 February 2014 at 18:32:07 UTC, Anton wrote:
> Dammit, I meant to post this to D.learn. Oh well.

Perhaps you could also look at DWT:

https://github.com/d-widget-toolkit/dwt

On Fri, 2014-02-14 at 18:17 +0000, Anton wrote:
[…]
> I am an OS X user and pretty much beginner in D who wants to write a simple application with a GUI. I know that GtkD is the most stable cross-platform GUI library out there, but for whatever reason after a full day of doing all sorts of things with it I can't get it to work on my Mac. I was going to post a question on the GtkD forums, but seeing that the latest post on there was from May of last year discouraged me from doing that.

GTK on anything other than Linux remains a real pain.

> QtD seems to have been abandoned. Most other libraries either have little support for OS X (it seems that OS X users of D are practically non-existent, which I suppose is too bad for me), or have been left to wither away, too.

Qt is the most portable of frameworks other than wxWidgets. With Qt5 there is the whole QML thing which is really quite good. There was some effort to try and get QtD restarted, but it has stalled a bit. I have to admit I departed D + QtD for Go + goqml since the former needs effort and the latter has got it. However I have conflict with this as I much prefer D over Go.

> Is there a more or less stable GUI library with decent support for OS X, with good documentation and/or examples *in D* (that is, not C, C++, or Java)?

I suspect not.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On Friday, 14 February 2014 at 18:17:15 UTC, Anton wrote:
>  From searching this forum I know that the question of which GUI
> library to use comes up every once in a while, but I don't want
> to bump old threads, especially since many of them seem to have
> strayed off into quasi-philosophical discussions of whatever (as
> is perfectly normal on this Internet).
>
> I am an OS X user and pretty much beginner in D who wants to
> write a simple application with a GUI. I know that GtkD is the
> most stable cross-platform GUI library out there, but for
> whatever reason after a full day of doing all sorts of things
> with it I can't get it to work on my Mac. I was going to post a
> question on the GtkD forums, but seeing that the latest post on
> there was from May of last year discouraged me from doing that.
>
> QtD seems to have been abandoned. Most other libraries either
> have little support for OS X (it seems that OS X users of D are
> practically non-existent, which I suppose is too bad for me), or
> have been left to wither away, too.
>
> Is there a more or less stable GUI library with decent support
> for OS X, with good documentation and/or examples *in D* (that
> is, not C, C++, or Java)?
>
> Thanks.

I'm working on a cross-platform GUI toolkit for D based on Tcl/TK.[1] So far it works nicely on Windows, Linux and MacOS. It's not very complete (only a few widgets implemented so far) but it shouldn't take more than a few months to finish. :)
Here's the repo:

https://github.com/nomad-software/tkd

The example can be built using dub:

    dub --config=example

dub will then pull in the following dependencies:

https://github.com/nomad-software/tcltk
https://github.com/nomad-software/x11

tcltk on Windows depends on ActiveTcl[2] being installed, but i'm going to compile my own DLLs to avoid this in future (Linux and Mac already have this installed). And x11 on MacOS depends on XQuartz[3] being installed which is unavoidable. (Linux uses this as default and on Windows the Win32 API is used instead.)

I decided to base it on Tcl/Tk purely because it's completely cross-platform, simple to use and learn. The downside is that the GUI libraries aren't that uber so don't expect to create the next Photoshop using it. The Tk widget library is complete though, so for simple GUI's it's brilliant. It's basically Python's Tkinter[4] ported to D.

I'm trying to get it done as fast as my girlfriend allows! ;D

[1]: http://www.tcl.tk/
[2]: http://www.activestate.com/activetcl
[3]: http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/
[4]: https://wiki.python.org/moin/TkInter

Le 14/02/2014 19:17, Anton a écrit :
>   From searching this forum I know that the question of which GUI
> library to use comes up every once in a while, but I don't want
> to bump old threads, especially since many of them seem to have
> strayed off into quasi-philosophical discussions of whatever (as
> is perfectly normal on this Internet).
>
> I am an OS X user and pretty much beginner in D who wants to
> write a simple application with a GUI. I know that GtkD is the
> most stable cross-platform GUI library out there, but for
> whatever reason after a full day of doing all sorts of things
> with it I can't get it to work on my Mac. I was going to post a
> question on the GtkD forums, but seeing that the latest post on
> there was from May of last year discouraged me from doing that.
>
> QtD seems to have been abandoned. Most other libraries either
> have little support for OS X (it seems that OS X users of D are
> practically non-existent, which I suppose is too bad for me), or
> have been left to wither away, too.
>
> Is there a more or less stable GUI library with decent support
> for OS X, with good documentation and/or examples *in D* (that
> is, not C, C++, or Java)?
>
> Thanks.

I am working on DQuick (like QtQuick but in D) with a friend, but it doesn't seems able to fit your needs as it's still a prototype.

Development is really slow at this moment cause of to few time, but the great news is Bruno have some ideas to put property bindings on the D side too!!!


https://github.com/D-Quick/DQuick

On 2014-02-14 19:37, Craig Dillabaugh wrote:

> Perhaps you could also look at DWT:
>
> https://github.com/d-widget-toolkit/dwt

Unfortunately it doesn't support OS X yet. I have an incomplete support written in D1 here: https://github.com/d-widget-toolkit/dwt-mac

Also, it doesn't have much of documentation in D, besides the snippets.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On 2014-02-14 20:15, Gary Willoughby wrote:

> tcltk on Windows depends on ActiveTcl[2] being installed, but i'm going
> to compile my own DLLs to avoid this in future (Linux and Mac already
> have this installed). And x11 on MacOS depends on XQuartz[3] being
> installed which is unavoidable. (Linux uses this as default and on
> Windows the Win32 API is used instead.)

I would say that anything using X11 on OS X is unacceptable.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On Friday, 14 February 2014 at 18:17:15 UTC, Anton wrote:
>  From searching this forum I know that the question of which GUI
> library to use comes up every once in a while, but I don't want
> to bump old threads, especially since many of them seem to have
> strayed off into quasi-philosophical discussions of whatever (as
> is perfectly normal on this Internet).
>
> I am an OS X user and pretty much beginner in D who wants to
> write a simple application with a GUI. I know that GtkD is the
> most stable cross-platform GUI library out there, but for
> whatever reason after a full day of doing all sorts of things
> with it I can't get it to work on my Mac. I was going to post a
> question on the GtkD forums, but seeing that the latest post on
> there was from May of last year discouraged me from doing that.
>
> QtD seems to have been abandoned. Most other libraries either
> have little support for OS X (it seems that OS X users of D are
> practically non-existent, which I suppose is too bad for me), or
> have been left to wither away, too.
>
> Is there a more or less stable GUI library with decent support
> for OS X, with good documentation and/or examples *in D* (that
> is, not C, C++, or Java)?
>
> Thanks.


A rather different approach would be to use something like Awesomium. I remember evilrat made bindings for it http://forum.dlang.org/thread/azrwqdorulvwhjcmmrxx@forum.dlang.org#post-azrwqdorulvwhjcmmrxx:40forum.dlang.org

I haven't used them yet though, so I'm unsure of how complete and such they are.

On Friday, 14 February 2014 at 18:50:21 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> I have to
> admit I departed D + QtD for Go + goqml since the former needs effort
> and the latter has got it. However I have conflict with this as I much
> prefer D over Go.

Yeah, I would hate to have to leave D for something like Go
because D doesn't have a decent OS X GUI library.

I'll take a look at the links everyone here has posted, thanks.