I was just wondering what everyone else is working on.  I think it would be cool to have a refrence , so were not duplicating each other and stuff :).

Im working on Windy as you might know ( GUI toolkit ).  I'm also going to
start a mysql module soon.

You guys ?

C

> I was just wondering what everyone else is working on.  I think it would
be
> cool to have a refrence , so were not duplicating each other and stuff :).
>
> Im working on Windy as you might know ( GUI toolkit ).  I'm also going to
> start a mysql module soon.
>
> You guys ?

Matthew:

For the foreseeable future (next 3 months):

1. I've written the MmFile (memory mapped file) and ExeModule (dynamic lib loader) modules, and they're with Walter ATM. It's my understanding that he's busy with his presentation so 0.78 might be some while. I'd like to get them out sometime soon, so that people can give me feedback, since each was done in half a day, and there may well be more features that can be easily and orthogonally added. I'm hoping my friend Greg can help with these, as he's interested in getting into D, but he's busy as well at the moment.

2. I'll be working with Walter (he'll be the much-needed compiler/language guru) on DTL in Feb/March, once the book deadline's past. The plan is to do a bit of a Stepanov and Lee in the first instance, and just get on with it in private. There are several reasons for this is (i) I work fast alone and time will be pressing, and (ii) I'm a real f-wit when it comes to discussing high-level things in writing, resulting in my getting unproductively confused (typical mentally challenged picture thinker). But the main reason is that if there are separate attempts going on, as I assume there are, then each will not pollute the other. I think in the early stages it'll be good to get separate, and potentially unique, ideas for the DTL, and then when each is at a cogent stage they can be presented to the community and well-criticised. Then the best parts can be fed from to form a final, world-beating, template library, with all the necessary support from the compiler. Walter and I've said we'd both like a template library that's more powerful, efficient and simple than STL, Boost, STLSoft, or any of the C++ libs.

In the dim and distant future (3-24 months):

1. I'd like to see a neat and macro free equivalent to ATL for COM programming. It'd be good to rewrite the shell-extensions (http://shellext.com/) in D at some point. :)

2. I'd like to see D become the best language for writing Python extensions. Same goes for Perl and Java.

3. I'd like to see a Visual Studio.NET plug-in editor for D.

4. I'd like to see DIDE and leds have a shared pluggable architecture

5. I'd like to see the D compiler have a pluggable architecture, and would love to write DLint (or should that be MDLint?) and DStrip plug-ins for that.

6. I plan to write a book on D sometime in the non-too-distant future.

Greetings. First post, but I've been following the group for some time.
My interest with D is primarily as an embedded systems language. To that end at least two things need to happen:
- integration with the GCC backend so we get access to the embedded targets used in the industry; someone on D.gnu is looking into that (as have I).
- the garbage collector needs a real-time variant. I am currently studying the Metronome garbage collector, part of IBM's Jikes JVM. Hopefully I will produce a D version soon enough.

Alex M.

C wrote:
> I was just wondering what everyone else is working on.  I think it would be
> cool to have a refrence , so were not duplicating each other and stuff :).
> 
> Im working on Windy as you might know ( GUI toolkit ).  I'm also going to
> start a mysql module soon.
> 
> You guys ?
> 
> C
> 
> 

"Cloud9 Virtual" <cloud9virtual@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:bto931$ggi$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> Greetings. First post, but I've been following the group for some time.
> My interest with D is primarily as an embedded systems language. To that
> end at least two things need to happen:
> - integration with the GCC backend so we get access to the embedded
> targets used in the industry; someone on D.gnu is looking into that (as
> have I).
> - the garbage collector needs a real-time variant. I am currently
> studying the Metronome garbage collector, part of IBM's Jikes JVM.
> Hopefully I will produce a D version soon enough.

Cool! Keep us informed of the progress.

1.  I was attempting to write a D port of Jalopy, a source code formatter, and it looked doable for a while.  Then I realized how dependent it was upon ANTLR, a lexer/parser written in Java.  So it quickly turned into two ports.  I am still toying with porting lex/yacc or ANTLR first, and then getting back to Jalopy.  I guess I could kick the tires on std.regexp and do the lexer/parser, although my programming skills are intermediate at best.

2.  I am investigating porting SWT to D to have a GUI that would use native widgets on the host OS when possible, and implemented widgets otherwise.  IBM has had great success with this library, its primary use being Eclipse IDE.  I know this is YAGUI (Yet another GUI) - however I want a platform-independent GUI without having to distribute GTK+ or any other library on Win32.

If anyone else is working on similar tools, let this thread know...

Brad


C wrote:

> I was just wondering what everyone else is working on.  I think it would be
> cool to have a refrence , so were not duplicating each other and stuff :).
> 
> Im working on Windy as you might know ( GUI toolkit ).  I'm also going to
> start a mysql module soon.
> 
> You guys ?
> 
> C
> 
> 

In article <buka0h$12k4$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Brad Anderson says...
>
>
>2.  I am investigating porting SWT to D to have a GUI that would use native widgets on the host OS when possible, and implemented widgets otherwise.  IBM has had great success with this library, its primary use being Eclipse IDE.  I know this is YAGUI (Yet another GUI) - however I want a platform-independent GUI without having to distribute GTK+ or any other library on Win32.

Before you start that maybe you could influence us to change to SWT instead of wxWindows. maybe it's better!

we are not married to wxWindows. SWT looks very good actually.
As a more recent toolkit it has all the probability of being better.

(the wx Project probably will not have a GTK soon.
I thought we were going to do the native windows and one X11
(or universal) to start with.)

Will you be interested in join us if we change to SWT?

What do you say guys is SWT better then wxWindows (I'm telling you, it might be - not that I looked in detail to any... ;)

these projects are huge (unless you have full time for it)
so 4/1 is better then (3+1)/2.

Ant

It is nothing more than a "gut" feel on SWT.  You touched on some of the issues.    (More recent toolkit, heavy support from IBM).

SWT-4D will need to wrap GTK for the *nix world (like SWT does), so in a sense, we would be replacing DUI with SWT-4D/GTK, and making the calls to native Win32 have the same wrappers.

I have thought that maybe DUI's wrappers of GTK could be modified to use native Win32 calls and then we have the beginnings of a platform independent GUI.  Then we've created a third option in addition to wxWindows and SWT.  But I'm pretty sure that the Eclipse/SWT group at IBM has had experience far beyond GTK/linux and Windows, as has wxWindows with their long history.  So I lean toward one of the existing two, and for some reason I lean further toward SWT.

One reason may be that it's in Java, a language far easier for me to port to D than C++.  (By the way, we are talking about a port to D, right?  I wouldn't be interested in wrapping the Java and requiring a JVM.)  That just has to do with my skill set.  The C portion of SWT source has to do with the JNI/native calls, and the meat of SWT is in the Java classes.  D doesn't need JNI, except to wrap the calls in an *.h file.

I am only investigating SWT, but everything looks favorable.  I haven't downloaded SWT's Linux/GTK source yet, but the Win32 source makes a lot of sense, and looks like it could be moved to D.  If you want to research SWT more, that would be great.  And I'll definitely join you and help however I can...

Cheers,
Brad



Ant wrote:

> In article <buka0h$12k4$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Brad Anderson says...
> 
>>
>>2.  I am investigating porting SWT to D to have a GUI that would use native widgets on the host OS when possible, and implemented widgets otherwise.  IBM has had great success with this library, its primary use being Eclipse IDE.  I know this is YAGUI (Yet another GUI) - however I want a platform-independent GUI without having to distribute GTK+ or any other library on Win32.
> 
> 
> Before you start that maybe you could influence us to change to SWT instead of wxWindows. maybe it's better!
> 
> we are not married to wxWindows. SWT looks very good actually.
> As a more recent toolkit it has all the probability of being better.
> 
> (the wx Project probably will not have a GTK soon.
> I thought we were going to do the native windows and one X11
> (or universal) to start with.)
> 
> Will you be interested in join us if we change to SWT?
> 
> What do you say guys is SWT better then wxWindows (I'm telling you,
> it might be - not that I looked in detail to any... ;)
> 
> these projects are huge (unless you have full time for it)
> so 4/1 is better then (3+1)/2.
> 
> Ant
> 
> 

Further, nobody is talking about XUL.  That's the XML User Interface Language that was used to build Mozilla, Firebird, Thunderbird, etc.  Maybe we strap a parser onto some code and go to work implementing XUL-4D.

See here for info:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xul/
http://luxor-xul.sourceforge.net/talk/vanx-mar-2003/slides.html#rich-41  (but look at the whole page, as it discusses SWT, wxWindows, Qt, etc...)

BA





Brad Anderson wrote:

> It is nothing more than a "gut" feel on SWT.  You touched on some of the issues.    (More recent toolkit, heavy support from IBM).
> 
> SWT-4D will need to wrap GTK for the *nix world (like SWT does), so in a sense, we would be replacing DUI with SWT-4D/GTK, and making the calls to native Win32 have the same wrappers.
> 
> I have thought that maybe DUI's wrappers of GTK could be modified to use native Win32 calls and then we have the beginnings of a platform independent GUI.  Then we've created a third option in addition to wxWindows and SWT.  But I'm pretty sure that the Eclipse/SWT group at IBM has had experience far beyond GTK/linux and Windows, as has wxWindows with their long history.  So I lean toward one of the existing two, and for some reason I lean further toward SWT.
> 
> One reason may be that it's in Java, a language far easier for me to port to D than C++.  (By the way, we are talking about a port to D, right?  I wouldn't be interested in wrapping the Java and requiring a JVM.)  That just has to do with my skill set.  The C portion of SWT source has to do with the JNI/native calls, and the meat of SWT is in the Java classes.  D doesn't need JNI, except to wrap the calls in an *.h file.
> 
> I am only investigating SWT, but everything looks favorable.  I haven't downloaded SWT's Linux/GTK source yet, but the Win32 source makes a lot of sense, and looks like it could be moved to D.  If you want to research SWT more, that would be great.  And I'll definitely join you and help however I can...
> 
> Cheers,
> Brad
> 
> 
> 
> Ant wrote:
> 
>> In article <buka0h$12k4$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Brad Anderson says...
>>
>>>
>>> 2.  I am investigating porting SWT to D to have a GUI that would use native widgets on the host OS when possible, and implemented widgets otherwise.  IBM has had great success with this library, its primary use being Eclipse IDE.  I know this is YAGUI (Yet another GUI) - however I want a platform-independent GUI without having to distribute GTK+ or any other library on Win32.
>>
>>
>>
>> Before you start that maybe you could influence us to change to SWT instead of wxWindows. maybe it's better!
>>
>> we are not married to wxWindows. SWT looks very good actually.
>> As a more recent toolkit it has all the probability of being better.
>>
>> (the wx Project probably will not have a GTK soon.
>> I thought we were going to do the native windows and one X11
>> (or universal) to start with.)
>>
>> Will you be interested in join us if we change to SWT?
>>
>> What do you say guys is SWT better then wxWindows (I'm telling you,
>> it might be - not that I looked in detail to any... ;)
>>
>> these projects are huge (unless you have full time for it)
>> so 4/1 is better then (3+1)/2.
>>
>> Ant
>>
>>
> 

Brad Anderson wrote:

> It is nothing more than a "gut" feel on SWT.  You touched on some of the issues.    (More recent toolkit, heavy support from IBM).
> 
> SWT-4D will need to wrap GTK for the *nix world (like SWT does), so in a sense, we would be replacing DUI with SWT-4D/GTK, and making the calls to native Win32 have the same wrappers.

This is an awesome idea.  I've since learned that GTK takes a very.... unique approach to grouping and arranging widgets.  For one, I can't for the life of me find *any* way to simply set the position/size of a UI element.  While it's commendable that GTK+ takes the layout manager notion to this extent, it makes wrapping it and win32 a serious pain.

For this reason, converting DUI to call win32 instead of GTK would be difficult.

Now it's apparent why this crossplatform GUI thing is so hard. ;)

(it's all GTKs fault!)

 -- andy

Ok, I guess you guys are discussing the possibility of dropping wxWindows for SWT.  Keep discussing it a little bit more before you do, please.  It would be nice to see both sides of the argument.  I'll take a peek at SWT since I have little knowledge of it (other than having played with Eclipse).  The interface looks good.  It's developed in Java, you say? Does it have it's own widget set or does it interface to an underlying platform API? Unfortunately I'm not a Java developer and don't much like Java. But since there appear to be more people interested in this port than wxWindows, it's really hard to argue against it.


On Tue, 20 Jan 2004 22:55:31 +0000, Ant wrote:

> In article <buka0h$12k4$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Brad Anderson says...
>>
>>
>>2.  I am investigating porting SWT to D to have a GUI that would use native widgets on the host OS when possible, and implemented widgets otherwise.  IBM has had great success with this library, its primary use being Eclipse IDE.  I know this is YAGUI (Yet another GUI) - however I want a platform-independent GUI without having to distribute GTK+ or any other library on Win32.
> 
> Before you start that maybe you could influence us to change to SWT instead of wxWindows. maybe it's better!
> 
> we are not married to wxWindows. SWT looks very good actually. As a more recent toolkit it has all the probability of being better.
> 
> (the wx Project probably will not have a GTK soon. I thought we were going
> to do the native windows and one X11 (or universal) to start with.)
> 
> Will you be interested in join us if we change to SWT?
> 
> What do you say guys is SWT better then wxWindows (I'm telling you, it might be - not that I looked in detail to any... ;)
> 
> these projects are huge (unless you have full time for it) so 4/1 is
> better then (3+1)/2.
> 
> Ant