[jstimpfle]

Yes I agree. I does not work with deep nested dependency chains where some choices are only decided at runtime (after loading additional text files).

Maybe it's possible, though, if we remove a little flexibility and flatten the dependencies, such that the application hardcodes a little more of what actually happens (e.g. specificies the file formats for image loading, the format of the ui description, etc).

This is the way I've done my own GUI application, where I simply coded what should happen, and created widgets as I needed them, and all the important decisions were known statically. But maybe this amount of specification is not what people expect from a standalone GUI library.

[alexlarsson]

It is possible to do it. And it probably happens naturally for a handrolled toolkit. However when the (one) developer of the GUI is different than the (many) app developers using it things typically end up different.

For instance you end up with things like ui designer tools that produce manifest files, where you just expect that some non-programmer can edit it and load it into your app without having to rebuild the toolkit.