Am one of those who prefer to use native widgets compared to something like GTK. But as you say they don't all provide all features. I think a good idea is the use a cross-platform GUI library for the common widgets that exists on all platforms, i.e. buttons and windows. There's not reason to use the native API for those. Then extend that with platform specif code using the native API, i.e. unified tool bar, sheets and so on, that is found on Mac OS X.
But there will always be the issue of "feature not yet supported" and bugs are introduced when the same code is run on a higher version of a given os. And it may take a while to fix it, i.e. to know what has changed in the new version etc. Native bindings are a never ending story. I have worked with some native-binding framworks and there is always an issue (maybe even a bug in the native os).
I agree that it would be really nice to have a cross-platform GUI framework written explicitly for D. But as you say that would be an enormous task to do.
Not sure. Maybe trying to catch up with and cater for at least 3 different platforms is the bigger task in the long run.
In my opinion, as D is getting ever more mature, it is about time we had a reliable standard cross-platform GUI. It need not be a framework like Swing. Maybe a more modern solution (HTML etc) would do the trick. I think there is a widening gap between what you can do with D in terms of business logic (a lot) and what you can do with it in terms of connecting it to the desktop / smartphone, i.e. to the user. D has what it takes but languages can only take off if they have some sort of GUI too (cf. Objective-C after the iPhone was introduced, and app development in general). Sorry, that's my marketing mind speaking again.
