Feliz VS Avalonia.FuncUI

NOTE: You can try this with the Feliz codebase, which is larger and has multiple .fsproj files. But as you will find out, the project structure is laid out just like we've seen here.

Feliz to create react apps, the most mature option.

The Feliz DSL https://zaid-ajaj.github.io/Feliz/ looks fairly similar to Reagent or there's Fable.Lit https://fable.io/Fable.Lit/ which is more like jsx in that you write the html directly, adding active components via interpolated string mechanisms. There is a VS Code add in that gives you html+css syntax highlighting and auto complete inside your F# files.

Feliz is a DSL for React, and paired with Vite give a hot reload experience that's close to the same as JS/TS, even the React dev tools work fine. Nobody has a ready to go package/template up right now but there's little stopping you from creating a NextJS app.

It means it's similar to the Feliz DSL used to build React web apps: https://zaid-ajaj.github.io/Feliz/

Feliz

I'm curious to see how this goes, F# seems to excel at these type of DSL's (e.g. Feliz, a react DSL is a joy), a big part thanks to type inference and list comprehensions which are a game changer for that pesky conditional rendering.

if you've ever used Feliz or Avalonia.FuncUI then this DSL will make you feel at home, it's less verbose than the original DSL and gives you basically the same benefits, in the case of Fun.Blazor is slightly less performant but it is a viable alternative

Along with Fable highly recommend a look at Feliz. A joy to work with and its ViewEngine can also be separately used w/ Giraffe if you enjoy the syntax:

https://zaid-ajaj.github.io/Feliz/

https://github.com/Zaid-Ajaj/Feliz

For those interested in .NET languages with alternative compilation targets, Elmish (https://elmish.github.io/elmish/) is pretty unique.

We use F# on the front end (instead of TS), and thanks to the Fable compiler (which transpiles F# to JS, Python, Dart, PHP and Rust), most of the benefits of an Elm-style model in the UI can be ported to all sorts of different outputs languages. The rust target is in beta, but its promising because the WASM bundle size stands to be dramatically lower.

While the default is reactivity library for Elmish is React, you can swap in Avalonia/FuncUI (https://github.com/fsprojects/Avalonia.FuncUI) pretty easily as well.

The code to declare/build the widgets is quite nice. Modifying widgets by hand on certain signals or manually re-wiring all the signals seems a bit outdated to me.

Wonder if something like FuncUI [1] could be built on top of it.

[1] https://github.com/fsprojects/Avalonia.FuncUI

OTOH, if desktop really is the primary focus, and if you can drop the idea of reusable UI code, then Avalonia is a great choice for F# as you can use a Avalonia.FuncUI and/or Elmish.Avalonia.

And one more MVU for you https://github.com/fsprojects/Avalonia.FuncUI