Ultralight
sciter
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Ultralight | sciter | |
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53 | 85 | |
4,594 | 2,562 | |
0.4% | 0.2% | |
2.9 | 0.0 | |
6 days ago | 12 months ago | |
CMake | C++ | |
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Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
Ultralight
- Ultralight: Display Web-Content Everywhere
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Writing a TrueType font renderer
[2] https://ultralig.ht/
- This year in Servo: over 1000 pull requests and beyond
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Arc browser launches its Windows client in beta
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...
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Ode to the M1
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.
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Anselm's Jazz Distributed Infrastructure Framework
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?
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Best cross-platform (Win, Mac, Linux) desktop frameworks?
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.
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Remember when this was 0% and 70 mb? This is comical.
tauri exists or if you wanted to ultralig.ht
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Digital Audio Workstation Front End Development Struggles
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/
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what do you think about alternative browser engines?
Nice review, thanks! There are also: Ultralight (based on Webkit), LiteHTML, Tkhtml3 and Lobo Evolution. See also timeline of web engines.
sciter
- Show HN: Open Source TailwindCSS UI Components
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Show HN: Dropflow, a CSS layout engine for node or <canvas>
> wondering if css and svg could be used as abstraction over graphics and UI libraries
There's another project called Sciter that uses CSS to target native graphics libraries: https://sciter.com
> I wonder how hard it was to implement css. I've heard it can be pretty complex.
It was hard, but the biggest barrier is the obscurity of the knowledge.
Text layout is the hardest, because working with glyphs and iterating them in reverse for RTL is brain-breaking. And line wrapping gets really complicated. It's also the most obscure because nobody has written down everything you need to know in one place. After I finished block layout early on, I had to stop for a couple of years (only working a few hours a week though) and learn all of the ins, outs, dos, and don'ts around shaping and itemizing text. A lot of that I learned by reading Pango's [1] source code, and a lot I pieced together from Google searches.
But other than that, the W3C specifications cover almost everything. The CSS2 standard [2] is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read. It's internally consistent, concise, and obviously the result of years of deliberation, trial and error. (CSS3 is great, but CSS2 is the bedrock for everything).
[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/
- Ask HN: Fastest cross-platform GUI stack/strategy
- Bringing Back Horizontal Rules in HTML Select Elements
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Immediate Mode GUI Programming
otherwise, if we have only retained mode as in browsers, we will need to modify the DOM heavily and create temporary elements for handles.
[1] https://sciter.com
- This year in Servo: over 1000 pull requests and beyond
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Rusty revenant Servo returns to render once more
I've still never used it but I've long been curious about Sciter:
https://sciter.com
- Ode to the M1
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So you want to write a GUI framework (2021)
These bullet points are exactly what I did in Sciter (https://sciter.com)
- Windowing
-- Tabs
-- Menus
-- Painting
-- Animation
-- Text
-The compositor
-Handling input
-- Pointer input
-- Keyboard input
- Accessibility
- Internationalization and localization
- Cross-platform APIs
- The web view
- Native look and feel
On top of that DOM and CSS implementations to achieve declarative UI. And JS as a languuage behind UI - declarative in some sense way of defining UI behavior.
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Servo, the parallel browser engine written in Rust
I'm not sure if it can support all the libraries but yes it can be used to make desktop apps. Theres also Sciter.
https://sciter.com/
What are some alternatives?
webview - Tiny cross-platform webview library for C/C++. Uses WebKit (GTK/Cocoa) and Edge WebView2 (Windows).
tauri - Build smaller, faster, and more secure desktop applications with a web frontend.
qt - Qt binding for Go (Golang) with support for Windows / macOS / Linux / FreeBSD / Android / iOS / Sailfish OS / Raspberry Pi / AsteroidOS / Ubuntu Touch / JavaScript / WebAssembly
qt-ultralight-browser - Ultra-lightweight web browser based on Qt Ultralight webview, powered by Ultralight HTML renderer
wry - Cross-platform WebView library in Rust for Tauri.
flexboard - React component library for re-sizable sidebars
ClassicUO - ClassicUO - an open source implementation of the Ultima Online Classic Client.
RmlUi - RmlUi - The HTML/CSS User Interface library evolved
litehtml - Fast and lightweight HTML/CSS rendering engine
NanoGUI - Minimalistic GUI library for OpenGL