GUIX Support for Custom, User-Defined Widgets

[Triggs02]

Reason For Feature Request

I am looking to develop a GUI application using GUIX Studio and noticed that there is no straight-forward way to add custom (non-native) widgets to be used within GUIX Studio. After an extensive search of the guix/guix_studio sub-directory, it appears the user is required to add to many independent files which makes adding a new widget difficult and time consuming.

The Solution I Would Like

I would like there to be support from within GUIX Studio for adding custom widgets that can be used alongside the existing native widgets in a given project. It would be acceptable to have this in the form of a plugin feature (as opposed to an all-out GUI within the Studio application) with enough documentation provided to guide the user through the process of adding their own widget. The user should then be able to easily reuse their custom widget in-between projects as normal and have all the standard properties that come with a GUIX widget.

Alternatives I Have Considered

It appears that the current widget library in Azure RTOS GUIX Studio version 6.4.0.0 (the most recent version available on the Microsoft App Store as of the time I am writing this) has quite an extensive number of widgets available for the user to choose from. The extensive number of widgets in combination with the templating feature seems like it might be suitable for my purposes; however, the ability to add custom widgets would help give me more creative freedom. It is from my understanding that these widgets are highly optimized to ensure limited resource usage when flashed to target MCUs, so adding new widgets seems like it would require proper attention to hardware-specific limitations that exist. Another route that I have considered taking is to attempt to circumnavigate the need to auto-generate the code from the Studio and just add in the new widget code myself. This approach is also not clear due to the need for the underlying code to understand the properties of the widget.

Additional Context

Through my research into GUIX, I stumbled across a previous issue on this repository from November 17th, 2020 that also requested a feature similar to what I am proposing. It had been noted on the issue by @goldscott that this feature was in the developer's backlog - is this still the case or has work been done towards this feature?