The "long tail" is like the long tail of Excel or Word; yeah, everybody only uses 5% of it but everybody uses a different 5%.
I'm pretty sure properly written GUI toolkits can be much smaller...
Like, I'm sure you can write a procedural generator in a handful of lines of code that spits out the full works of Shakespeare. It's probably possible, if you have the right seed and the right algorithm.
...but practically speaking, how do you actually build one?
The same goes for UI libraries; certainly it should be possible (in theory) to have a minimal beautiful GUI libraries with an excellent API; but every attempt to build one seems to have failed.
Perhaps the problem domain is actually more difficult than you're giving it credit for...
I'm pretty sure we haven't explored the sheer depth of simplifications that can still be done.
I can't find anything on their website that seems to be that sort of thing?
Their writing is here: http://vpri.org/html/writings.php
Their various reports are there (most recent first):
http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf
http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf
http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2010004_steps10.pdf
http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2009016_steps09.pdf
- http://www.fltk.org/index.php - https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano
Then again most gui libraries end up including networking, file handling, etc...
I'm pretty sure properly written GUI toolkits can be much smaller. As in, satisfying 90% of our needs in a couple thousand lines of code. (The remaining 10% might require heaps and heaps of code, but I'm sure it doesn't have to affect the core.)
It's only an intuition at this point (I have yet to implement my own GUI toolkit). But I have reasons to believe this intuition is right: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf