On Saturday, 15 February 2014 at 00:37:11 UTC, Kapps wrote:
> 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.

it was C++ wrapper, would work for minimal stuff but i won't recommend using awesomium at all. for me it looks almost dead now(both forums and update rate), and pretty much the same can be achieved with webkit. awesomium just adds offscreen rendering and JS event handling, but it is commercial software so for most people here it would be unacceptable.

On Fri, 2014-02-14 at 23:58 +0100, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> 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.

Agreed.

All Python folk doing cross-platform work use Qt AFAIK

Tkinter is ancient and shows it, despite the make over a few years back. There are some adherents (because it comes standard with all Python distributions), but most people treat it as unusable legacy.

There is an attempt to create a replacement for the turtle package (*) based on direct OpenGL rendering, but sadly the energy generated during the sprint at PyConUK 2014 has petered out a bit and progress is now slow.


(*) which is really the last useful thing based on Tkinter.
-- 
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 2014-02-14 19:17, 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.

Do you need it to be cross-platform? Otherwise you could use Cocoa directly. Although it currently is a bit of a pain to do so.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On Friday, 14 February 2014 at 22:58:10 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> 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.

Actually looking at this link I may be able to remove that dependency too. Which is nice.
http://www.python.org/getit/mac/tcltk/

On 2014-02-15 12:14, Gary Willoughby wrote:

> Actually looking at this link I may be able to remove that dependency
> too. Which is nice.
> http://www.python.org/getit/mac/tcltk/

Aqua Cocoa Tk is the way to go.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

>
> Do you need it to be cross-platform? Otherwise you could use Cocoa directly. Although it currently is a bit of a pain to do so.

I don't care about cross-platform compatibility for now. I've found dstep, but haven't looked into it yet. It does look like it could be somewhat painful to use, though, especially considering that I'm not too comfortable with ObjC.

I also don't really care for how pretty it looks at the moment. Right now it's for myself, so I just want something that lets me build a GUI in a relatively straightforward way, even if the result is a bit on the ugly side. Obviously, if what I'm doing goes anywhere, I will look into other options, but I need whatever I can get to work to start with.

On Saturday, 15 February 2014 at 12:44:00 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2014-02-15 12:14, Gary Willoughby wrote:
>
>> Actually looking at this link I may be able to remove that dependency
>> too. Which is nice.
>> http://www.python.org/getit/mac/tcltk/
>
> Aqua Cocoa Tk is the way to go.

Yep. It seems new versions of Tcl/Tk on Mac defaults to remove the dependency on x11. Which is awesome, no more x11 needed!

On 2014-02-15 18:26, Anton wrote:

> I don't care about cross-platform compatibility for now. I've found
> dstep, but haven't looked into it yet. It does look like it could be
> somewhat painful to use, though, especially considering that I'm not too
> comfortable with ObjC.

Yes, it's quite painful to use without language support.

> I also don't really care for how pretty it looks at the moment. Right
> now it's for myself, so I just want something that lets me build a GUI
> in a relatively straightforward way, even if the result is a bit on the
> ugly side. Obviously, if what I'm doing goes anywhere, I will look into
> other options, but I need whatever I can get to work to start with.

If you don't care how it looks then you could basically use any framework. Gtk+ seems to be best supported from D, but you already tried that ...

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On Saturday, 15 February 2014 at 01:43:20 UTC, Anton wrote:
> 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.

D is good language, but when I'm trying to write something more complex like GtkD virtual data table view, I realize that I can't do it in D. That is, if I want to learn D, I must learn C first. Which is nonsense. So, D needs a good GUI library written in D. And a good IDE too. VisualD is not good enough.

On Monday, 24 March 2014 at 16:07:33 UTC, Nikos wrote:
> On Saturday, 15 February 2014 at 01:43:20 UTC, Anton wrote:
>> 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.
>
> D is good language, but when I'm trying to write something more complex like GtkD virtual data table view, I realize that I can't do it in D. That is, if I want to learn D, I must learn C first. Which is nonsense. So, D needs a good GUI library written in D. And a good IDE too. VisualD is not good enough.

I agree that these improvmements would be good.

When you say "I can't do it in D" do you mean that you literally need to use C itself, or do you just mean using the C GTK API from D?

Bear in mind that D includes many concepts and a lot of syntax C. In order to understand all of D, you will by definition end up learning a lot of C-like things, even if you don't use them very often in your real D code.