Adam D. Ruppe:
Another problem I just realized though: on Windows, bitmaps are
stored upside down so you'd have to draw y-inverted too. Didn't
make a difference here because the image doesn't care about
orientation but it would be visible with a lot of other
programs.
Maybe simple functions or mixins (if inlining isn't reliable)
could be used to hide this detail.
This high level library should generate the same image output on
all systems it compiles on.
(and this library isn't really made for max performance,
instead preferring simplicity of use and implementation.
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.
Eventually I think such simple simpledisplay.d and color.d
modules should go in Phobos, after some cleaning, ddoc string, a
heavy cycle of review and improvements, API design, etc. It's a
battery worth putting in the standard library. So people can
write portable and very easy to use little graphical programs in
D.
Delphi has a large and efficient GUI toolkit in the standard
library, but I think it's not a good idea to put a GUI toolkit in
Phobos. But a little library as simpledisplay is OK.
Maybe for Phobos simpledisplay.d could be renamed just
graphicdisplay.d or something like that.
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.
A color.d module for Phobos should not import simpledisplay.d.
And it should be a top-level module (unlike now, that's inside a
package).
Even the Python standard library has a very minimal color module:
http://docs.python.org/2/library/colorsys.html
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). It's
not meant to replace a complete library for graphing. It's meant
for a quick and very simple display of all kind of data during
development or for quick D script-like programs.
When I program in Python I often use the good
http://matplotlib.org/ . It's a large plotting library that
allows me to plot data with few lines of code. This allows me to
visualize intermediate data during debugging, like arrays, so it
improves my understanding of data and such data.
Bye,
bearophile
