gtk - garbage toolkit

GTk is bloated trash due to its dependencies like GLib, cairo and DBus.
Qt4/5 is equally bloated C++ garbage.

OpenVG used to be a saner alternative to cairo, but it's fallen by the wayside and support for it in Gallium has been dropped and might end up getting removed from Mesa in the future.

So if you were to throw away gtk and qt, and starting from first principles, how would you go about building a minimalist themable widget library on top of GL/GLES for Wayland that can be used to build a desktop where applications have a common look-and-feel?

>>3

I investigated this and it was too hard to make things not look terrible when resizing

Yes, layout is big problem, not sure if there's a minimalist approach.

why did you start out so great and then turn into shit

What would you propose? Build it on top of DRM and just do software rendering into a framebuffer? How is that not shit?

Wayland is a lot smaller to X11. The only problems with GL/GLES I can see are the fact that the underlying shader compiler usually brings in Clang/LLVM. Even nVidia, AMD's, and Intel binary blob drivers use Clang/LLVM internally. But if you want GPU accelerated rendering, that's what you have to use, until Vulkan becomes available, and that will also use Clang/LLVM.