Piotr Szturmaj:

> Hmm... What if Lazarus GUI code and/or LCL could be ported to D? I've seen full featured Object Pascal parser in their repository. Maybe it's possible to transcode the source to D ;) Just thinking loud.

Even if that's possible, I think it's not a good idea to put the resulting large library in Phobos, because everyone has different needs and tastes regarding GUI toolkits.

Bye,
bearophile

W dniu 10.06.2013 00:29, bearophile pisze:
> Piotr Szturmaj:
>
>> Hmm... What if Lazarus GUI code and/or LCL could be ported to D? I've
>> seen full featured Object Pascal parser in their repository. Maybe
>> it's possible to transcode the source to D ;) Just thinking loud.
>
> Even if that's possible, I think it's not a good idea to put the
> resulting large library in Phobos, because everyone has different needs
> and tastes regarding GUI toolkits.

Yes, I was just suggesting to not write such library from scratch.

On 6/9/13, Adam D. Ruppe <destructionator@gmail.com> wrote:
> on Windows, bitmaps are stored upside down so you'd have to draw y-inverted too.

I have some vague memory about a trick where using a negative height would flip the bitmap automatically. (something like that .. maybe wrong, worth trying though?)

On Sunday, 9 June 2013 at 22:09:55 UTC, bearophile wrote:
> This high level library should generate the same image output on all systems it compiles on.

Naturally. But if we can get a 10% performance boost that can be worth it in a lot of cases. Maybe the api can actually be an output range for colors that does one pixel at a time from top to bottom, left to right. That'd be less raw than the pointer but still avoid recalculating offsets every time when it could just be a simple increment.

> A small, basic and simple to use graphics library has its usages. For small single-module (or few modules) programs like the one I have linked in Rosettacode you don't want to import a large GUI library.

Yes, I agree. I used to do a lot of fun stuff in DOS back in the day when all you have is a 256 color, 320x200 framebuffer. It was great actually, much lower learning curve than today's huge GUIs and capable of all the fun stuff. That's why I made simpledisplay.d and terminal.d, an attempt to get that kind of thing easy again on new operating systems.

There's libraries like SDL that are fairly simple and quite useful too but that is much bigger.

> Eventually I think such simple simpledisplay.d and color.d modules should go in Phobos

That's something I'm not really interested in though, because....

> after some cleaning, ddoc string, a heavy cycle of review and improvements, API design, etc.

that is starting to sound like work! I hack together most these modules over weekends, and even if I can spill onto weekdays it is still just getting it to barely work for me then time to move on.

> Regarding color, I think it will enjoy few more color-related functions, like a function to generate a rainbow given the temperature of a black body, few more greying functions, a bit more colorimetry, etc.

Yeah, those would be cool. I think I have blackbody code somewhere, I wrote it for one of my games. My lazypng.d module also has a greyscale thing - the plan there was to do png files to and from ranges, and add various algorithm like things to operate on them.

The png reader in there is actually more complete than the one in my png.d, but png.d includes nice helper functions for palette swaps, creating Windows icons, etc. that lazypng lacks.

anyway I'm getting sidetracked, sometimes I wish I could get enough money to pay my bills just for hacking on random D stuff - maybe then I could kill this todo list!

> A third small module (less than 15-30 KB of code) worth adding to Phobos, that builds on graphicdisplay.d and color.d, could generate basic data plots (scatter plots and line plots).

What might be better is to do it on top of something like a simple image class, which can then be drawn to the screen or saved to a file.

A downside though is a lot of graphics functions would have to be written, but I think I want to do that anyway eventually. I wouldn't do a great job, like most my modules I'd just hack it together over a weekend, but it'd be a start. I already have an image.d that can be saved to a file.