On Thursday, 10 July 2014 at 10:43:45 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
Depends on what Aurora is meant to target. The video says it is
meant to be more of a playful environment that allows pac-man
mockups and possibly GUIs in the long run, but not sure who
would want that? There are so many much better IDE/REPL
environments for that: Swift, Flash&Co, HTML5/WebGL/Dart/PNaCL,
Python and lots of advanced frameworks with engines for cross
platform mobile development at all kinds of proficiency levels.
Seems to me what a language that D needs is two separate
frameworks:
1. A barebones 3D high performance library with multiple
backends that follow the hardware trends (kind of what you are
suggesting). Suitable for creating games and HPC stuff.
2. A stable high level API with geometric libraries for dealing
with established abstractions: font files, vector primitives,
PDF generation and parsing with canvas abstraction for both
screen/gui, print, file… Suitable for applications/web.
3. An engine layering of 2. on top of 1. for portable
interactive graphics but a higher abstraction level than 1.
YES(I am so glad some one else sees this)! This is basically what
I have been saying all along. I hoped the immediate mode could be
(1) and the retained mode could be (2/3) so that we could have
both and not be limited, but that does not seem to be the
direction it is going. It is not even clear what the immediate
mode 'is' right now in the current designs of Aurora. It seems to
be more of an implementation detail rather than something usable
on its own.
As it stands now, the direction that Aurora is taking seems to be
an odd one IMHO. It is trying to be some thing in between (1) and
(2/3) but I don't think that is useful to any one except maybe
gui writers. That is what prompted me to post.
