[larsivi]

What is dcurses? (Long and unstructured explanation):
dcurses is supposed to be an implementation of curses in D. With implementation of curses, I mean that the functionality present in curses and it's various clones, will be implemented in D. It DON'T mean that it will be a clone API-wise. The curses API is very pure C (read procedural). If that is what you want, you can as well link to a C implementation and use if from D. I want to modernize it into a library that is somewhat more OO since there are several natural objects in the system. Very many of the functions in curses take a WINDOW pointer as an argument. I plan to make these functions methods of that class (which is a struct in curses), as it will reduce redundancy and code size. I expect to find side effects during that process, but problems are there to be solved.

Goals for dcurses:
It should become a stable library for consoleoriented development in D.
It will be implemented fully in D.
It won't necessarily follow the conventions and API of the original curses.
It should be cross-platform.

The current situation:
dcurses is a partial port of PDCurses to D. It is currently Windows only (although it should be fairly easy to do the linux part) and only has a subset of the API implemented. Some of the functions has modernized names (the C ones are rather cryptic), and the rest will follow. The sample app fireworks compiles and executes, though not correctly. The reason is more than likely UTF-issues as they weren't really handled in PDCurses.

Coming up next:
My next task is to correct the output.
Then implement more of the samples from PDCurses (as that will prompt the need for more implementation in the core library).
During this process I will continue to reorganize until I find it better looking. For inspiration I might look at JCurses, but it seems to have somewhat differing goals.

Are you interested in dcurses?:
Post suggestions in the forum.
Post patches (or send them to me).
Use it (at least when it really becomes usable).
Don't fret over incompatibilities with curses, ncurses of PDCurses.
Don't fret over incompatibilities with previous versions of dcurses until at least one stable release has been made.
Don't expect it to be further developed at the speed of light, a turtle is probably a better target for comparison.

Lars Ivar Igesund
larsivar 'at' nospam 'dot' igesund 'dot' net

[larsivi]

After trying to make some deeper changes to dcurses, I found that doing a direct port was to limiting. I've therefore discontinued it and started a complete rewrite. Hopefully something will show up in the not so distant future.