JWM VS gio

sigh

Yeah. I am very bullish on Kotlin. Think it's probably the most exciting language evolving right now.

I went on a few-tweet minirant here about why:

https://twitter.com/GavinRayDev/status/1443279425311805440

But the tl;dr is that:

- There is Jetpack Compose currently, for Desktop, Web, and Android

- And Kotlin Native putting a large portion of resources into Skia bindings (JetBrains calls the lib "Skiko" for Kotlin Native https://github.com/JetBrains/skiko and "Skija")

It's very clear (and there are some employees which have confirmed this IIRC) that they are working on "Jetpack Compose Everywhere" that runs on iOS as well, from a single codebase.

There's the big Kotlin event going on right now, where they just announced the new WASM backend and changes in their compiler + IR commonizing/restructuring ("K2").

- https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2021/10/the-road-to-the-k2...

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pqz9sKXatw

The net result is that you wind up with a single language that you can use to write your backend API, your UI code (Jetpack Compose app deployed across Web/Android/iOS/Mac/Win/Linux, or transpile to JS/TS if you just want a web app, etc) and with Kotlin Native even your native, low-level code to integrate with existing C/C++ etc ecosystem.

KN already does automatic bindgen for C and Swift headers, they have direct C++ interop (like Swift does) on their future roadmap as a potential "todo".

All of this is mostly possible already -- I can do the same thing using IE Java, GraalVM, and a transpiler like Google's j2cl or bck2brwser (which is what Gluon uses for JavaFX on the web). Including the "native" part.

IE, here's a contribution I made to get GraalVM producing native binaries using Skia from the JVM + JNI Jetbrains Skia library:

https://github.com/HumbleUI/JWM/issues/158

But Kotlin is pushing the hardest to make this whole platform/stack from native <-> desktop <-> mobile <-> browser a seamless, unified experience. And you can feel it, when you try to do the "whole stack, every platform, one language" thing.

Sorry for the rant and wall of text!

> At least with a language like Go, it somewhat makes sense, and has been attempted: https://gioui.org/

Gio UI is an immediate-mode UI, and immediate-mode UIs map very nicely to Rust. egui is quite easy to use. https://www.egui.rs/

I've been writing a WASM app using gio & I found myself wanting for a simplified web library. In addition I drew some inspiration from leptos server functions. A friend of mine mentioned it has some similarities with next.js

I am building the same but with golang and https://gioui.org/

This release of Gonum/plot is in sync with Gonum-v0.13.0 and updates the vg/vggio backend to the latest Gio API.

Historically, C++. Today, (unfortunately) a lot of (non-game) desktop apps are written in HTML/CSS/JS using Electron. There are projects like Fyne and GIO that aim to make Go a viable language for building large-scale performant desktop apps. My open-source hobby project Supersonic is a music player app built using Fyne.

gioui.org

It’s actually extremely easy, if you use one of the actively developed options like https://fyne.io or https://gioui.org for example. Flutter’s Dart may help with real-time hacking of UI but Go produces better code in the long run!