On Wednesday, 23 November 2022 at 03:26:06 UTC, thebluepandabear
wrote:
This is a very brief overview and we are happy to expand on
this discussion.
Barbara
Co-Founder of CopperSpice
Hello Barbara,
I guess it's not amazingly difficult if you have good
experience with OpenGL, and SFML/SDL (there may be other
libraries I've missed?). (I myself am not experienced in this
but I am learning some of these things.) But of course, this
will take a lot of time and hard work, and no one will be
making a profit from it so it would be a purely
volunteer/hobbyist project...
As you might have seen the guy above me made an OpenGL-based
GUI library, so it is possible!
As one of the lead developers of CopperSpice I can assure you
writing an effective, cross platform, thread aware, GUI library
is indeed very complicated and time consuming. OpenGL does not
handle font rendering, glyph shaping, or unicode text. All of
these must be implemented to be a general purpose GUI library.
OpenGL is not the only requirement for a GUI and actually not the
hardest part. Handling events and reacting to user input is not
part of OpenGL so it needs to be part of the GUI library.
One of our CS libraries provides an OpenGL surface you can embed
in a CopperSpice GUI application. We recently added a new library
to support a Vulkan surface in a similar way.
We are an open source project and I do not consider CopperSpice
to be a hobby, but rather a community project. If anyone would
like to learn more about the low level parts of a GUI please join
our team and consider contributing to CopperSpice.
Barbara
