The One With D

Tom has released the first beta of his long awaited (at least by me) GUI library for games, Hybrid. With this library, he stepped off the beaten path and took an original approach, combining design goals of both immediate mode and retained mode GUIs. From the Wiki:

Hybrid is a Graphical User Interface toolkit for the D programming language. It is primarily aimed at games (for menus, in-game options, debug consoles, HUDs), their tools and other sorts of multimedia applications, where the GUI can change dynamically.

Hybrid uses a different programming model than most GUI toolkits. GUI code must only appear in one place, instead of being separated into setup, event handling and cleanup. Not only the layout or data can change - the whole model of the GUI may be modified during execution with minimal effort from the programmer.

Hybrid does not currently support any form of lazy updating or rendering, thus may not be suited for applications that don’t redraw and update their state every frame.

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