What will it do?

It will allow faster development of GPL2+ applications that generally do similar things that pcb-rnd, but are not necessarily with PCB-related:

• offer the same infra with actions and fungw (potentially with scripting)
• offer the same multiple-HID GUI system, with configurable menus and DAD
• the GUI has the menu, the central drawing/viewing/render area and the command prompt, everything else is up to the user

What is included?

• the fungw based action system
• the plugin system
• the conf system (without conf_core)
• generic types (pcb_coord_t included)
• the HID infrastructure, including DAD
• dynamic menu system
• the color system
• the event system?
• the error reporting/logging system
• most of the compatibility layer (misc_util, compat_*, safe_fs)
• pcb-printf
• a bunch of the minilibs (dependency of all the above): lihata, genvector, genregex, genht

What are the benefits of using it?

• code reuse on the GUI and sophisticated UI/conf/action infrastructure
• support for multiple GUI toolkits (HIDs)
• future GUI HIDs appearing in pcb-rnd will be automatically available for other users
• maybe support for exporters (e.g. png, ps)?
• bonus for coralEDA apps: similar look&feel?

What are the drawbacks of using it?

• the license is GPL2+, the user application links to it, so it needs to have the same license
• the infrastructure is generic, but may be too heavy for a simple application
• steep learning curve
• at the moment microsoft windows is not supported by any of the GUIs