Ultralight VS Flutter

[2] https://ultralig.ht/

Web rendering would be Blink, with V8 being the JavaScript engine. I believe they have their own UI rendering process.

I know of another company that does something similar for the UI process, but with WebKit instead as the base:

https://github.com/ultralight-ux/ultralight#rocket-dual-high...

What I'd really like to see with CEF et al, is JS being dropped, in favor of directly controlling the DOM from the host language. Then we could, for example, write a Rust (or Kotlin, Zig, Haskell, etc) desktop application that simply directly manipulated the DOM, and had it rendered by a HTML+CSS layout engine. Folks could then write a React-like framework for that language (to help render & re-render the DOM in an elegant way).

Ultralight (https://ultralig.ht/) looks pretty cool. I think another possible option is Servo (https://github.com/servo/servo) – it was abandoned by Mozilla along with Rust during their layoffs a while back (but the project still seems to have a decent bit of activity). It would be great if some group of devs could revive the project, or a company could fund such a revival.

Eventually, we'll need to reflect on, and explore whether HTML+CSS is really the best way to do layout, and we could maybe perhaps consider proting the Android/iOS layout approach over to desktop.

I'm curious if the project will be open-source or do you have plans to go the Awesomium/Ultralight route with both open/closed sources and volume licenses? Or do you plan to offer commercial support services like other open source software?

I’m not tied to any language, but it needs to be able to wrap a c++ library. I started with .NET 7 MAUI - no linux support & very mobile focused. Tried out Electron. Wins on ease and usability, but has massive overhead. (Basic “Hello world” executable compiled to over 200mb) I then discovered Ultralight (https://ultralig.ht/). Big win on size, but was last updated 3 years ago.

tauri exists or if you wanted to ultralig.ht

I agree web stuff is really the best way to develop UIs. Good luck making responsive stuff in C++ for example. The paradigm of HTML, CSS, and JS is extremely powerful and even allows you to use canvas, webgpu, wasm.

There are multiple commercial projects that use web dev paradigm for GUIs:

https://coherent-labs.com/

https://ultralig.ht/

https://sciter.com/

Nice review, thanks! There are also: Ultralight (based on Webkit), LiteHTML, Tkhtml3 and Lobo Evolution. See also timeline of web engines.

[3]: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/tree/master/packages/flut...

Thanks - that link does not appear to be open access, anyways I don't think I've seen it. I'm familiar with Flutter at a high-level (Kevin Moore gave a great talk on it at Wasm I/O), and I think other than requiring users to work in Dart, it is probably one of the most powerful ways to do cross-platform UI today.

Worth noting that their original GPU backend was Skia, and now they are retooling around Flutter GPU (Impeller)[0], which is kind of designed similarly as an abstract rendering interface over platform-specific GPU APIs.

[0]https://github.com/flutter/flutter/wiki/Flutter-GPU

If you are considering Electron/React then I would suggest adding Flutter to your list of technologies to consider. It uses Dart (a language similar to C#) and has a lot going for it… relatively quick to get up to speed with, fantastic developer experience (e.g., hot reload, great IDE support, good development tools) and very strong cross-platform support: it generates native iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows and Linux executables. Check it out: https://flutter.dev/

You can find the React Native documentation here and Flutter Documentation here.

[1]https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/55092#issuecomment...

> There is actually a great issue thread on the Flutter GitHub that explains exactly why other solutions do not work correctly when compared to hooks [0]

Interesting. I assume you are referring to this comment in particular -> https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/51752#issuecomment... ?