On Thu, 19 Oct 2006 13:59:08 -0700, Jari-Matti Mäkelä <jmjmak@utu.fi.invalid> wrote:

>
> There was at least some discussion in Slashdot over two years ago:
>
> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=92172&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=7929925
>
> "First off, SWT only performes well on windows, and stack on top of that
> that the principal native abstractions are taylored to a win32
> environment. Based off of that it is easy to see how SWT performes quite
> nicely on Windows.
>
> Elsewhere it sucks. MacOS, GTK, photon, Motif. Even porrly writeen swing
> programs outperform on those platforms."
>
>


Again, your quote refers to Java SWT: perhaps there might be an element of truth there, yet it looks more to me like prejudice since I've not experienced the speed deficit issue (although, I agree that it's big and slow to load, however).  DWT performs quite spritely from what I've seen in a couple of projects.  The size of the code is more alarming to me than anything else (the executables grow to a couple megabytes).


> IMO it's a bit sad to see that SWT has sucked on everything else but
> Windows for a very long time now. I personally do not want to support
> anything related to GTK or SWT because they're technically very low
> quality. I know many companies embrace SWT because the license is quite
> liberal, but still it's a sign of apathetic 'Eat shit' attitude to force
> clients to use stuff that makes their computers vomit in order to save a
> few hundreds of bucks in licensing costs.


The SWT running on GTK 2 seems to work quite well, so I don't really understand you here either.  I don't consider GTK 2 to be a low quality library, although it is in C and horribly ugly to look at or program in.  But I don't like most of the frameworks out there anyway, C++-based ones included.  At least GTK is very accessible from D precisely because of its C interface.  What I don't like about GTK (or SWT) is the size... I prefer lightweight and perhaps that it's my biggest grudge against many of these libraries.  From a pragmatic perspective, however, GTK performs quite well, and I can see a GTK-based SWT working adequately with D, performance-wise.  DUIT has been a proof of concept of this fact.  After-all, GTK is moving towards Cairo and glitz (OpenGL) based surfaces: SWT is on top of all that.  This certainly looks more hopeful for any D port of SWT.


> Maybe in the future they'll release SWT under EPL and QT will be
> available under GPL 3.0 (huge maybe) - then it might become possible to
> use QT as a backend for SWT and DWT. IANAL, these licensing things are
> hard to understand.
>
> For the time being Harmonia is IMHO the best alternative as an official
> GUI library. I will start using it immediately after it is ported to Linux.


Harmonia is beautiful and small... a good example of what I like also. But it's programming interface is yet a litte unusual and unfamiliar.  Furthermore, it's still hasn't been ported to other platforms, although doing so shouldn't be that difficult.
Harmonia could do well with the right support and initiative from more people than jsut the maintainers (precisely, I'm sure, what they are looking for); however support has been something that's been lacking from almost every GUI project put to the forefront.

-JJR

On Mon, 23 Oct 2006 12:49:07 -0700, John Reimer <terminal.node@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 19 Oct 2006 13:59:08 -0700, Jari-Matti Mäkelä <jmjmak@utu.fi.invalid> wrote:
>
>>
>> There was at least some discussion in Slashdot over two years ago:
>>
>> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=92172&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=7929925
>>
>> "First off, SWT only performes well on windows, and stack on top of that
>> that the principal native abstractions are taylored to a win32
>> environment. Based off of that it is easy to see how SWT performes quite
>> nicely on Windows.
>>
>> Elsewhere it sucks. MacOS, GTK, photon, Motif. Even porrly writeen swing
>> programs outperform on those platforms."
>>
>>
>
>
> Again, your quote refers to Java SWT: perhaps there might be an element of truth there, yet it looks more to me like prejudice since I've not experienced the speed deficit issue (although, I agree that it's big and slow to load, however).  DWT performs quite spritely from what I've seen in a couple of projects.  The size of the code is more alarming to me than anything else (the executables grow to a couple megabytes).
>


Okay, it occurred to me that I missed the whole point completely: the fellow was talking about SWT on win32 performing great (which is what DWT is at the moment).  So I really made no sense here since a DWT is not available yet on other platforms to prove that it also could perform well... disregard my statement.  But I still hold that I think SWT isn't so bad as he makes out on other platforms.  I don't fully understand what he means (note that I've only ever used SWT on linux and win32, though).

-JJR

Bruno Medeiros wrote:

> That's good to hear. For an example of what I meant in the previous post, here's two things I think should be in the standard library, and for what I see they are not in Ares (as well as Phobos):
> * the write/writeln unformating output functions.
> (news://news.digitalmars.com:119/eg2aka$1ot9$1@digitaldaemon.com)
> * extended path&file management functions, like Kramer's pathext:
> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/announce/4363.html
> 
> 

Is that better than phobos' std.path?
At a quick glance it looks pretty similar.
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/phobos/std_path.html

PHP has PEAR and PECL.

Sometimes projects written in these languages even have forges.  Like Mambo.

-[Unknown]


> John Reimer wrote:
>> On Thu, 19 Oct 2006 13:10:31 -0700, Georg Wrede <georg.wrede@nospam.org>  wrote:
>>
>>> John Reimer wrote:
>>>
>>>> Lionello Lunesu
>>>>
>>>>> I'd prefer sourceforge, where it will be seen by more people.
>>>>>
>>>>> dsource is nice and has certainly done a lot for D, but it makes us  look  like some sort of cult.
>>>>
>>>>  What?!!!
>>>
>>>
>>> LOL!
>>>
>>> I'm not entirely sure he doesn't have a point.
>>>
>>> (At least partially.)
>>
>>
>>
>> Just maybe... but I was hoping not. :D
>>
>> -JJR
> 
> Oh, also pooling code is also something that seems to be popular with other easy-to-use languages.  Perl has CPAN, Python has the "cheese-shop", Ruby has Rubyforge, ... but I guess those are all cults now that I think of it.  :-P
> 
> --bb

Bill Baxter wrote:
> Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> 
>> That's good to hear. For an example of what I meant in the previous post, here's two things I think should be in the standard library, and for what I see they are not in Ares (as well as Phobos):
>> * the write/writeln unformating output functions.
>> (news://news.digitalmars.com:119/eg2aka$1ot9$1@digitaldaemon.com)
>> * extended path&file management functions, like Kramer's pathext:
>> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/announce/4363.html
>>
>>
> 
> Is that better than phobos' std.path?
> At a quick glance it looks pretty similar.
> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/phobos/std_path.html

pathext adds functions that std.path does not have. (and that are quite useful, like normalizaPath)

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - MSc in CS/E student
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D