dali VS Yue

Tangentially related, I've written a barebones assembler for Android .apk files once (strictly speaking, the assembler is for .dex files, but it also comes with a set of tools to package and sign .apk files). It's written mainly in Nim and provides enough primitives to allow creating Java "stubs" for native .so libraries, so that .apk-s can be built in Nim WITHOUT JDK AT ALL. The Android NDK is still kinda needed/useful, though IIRC mainly for access to adb, and especially adb logcat (which you'll need A LOT for debugging if you try to use this contraption).

I'd love to One Day™ Rewrite It In Rust.

The .dex assembler itself is at: https://github.com/akavel/dali — you may like to check out the tests at: https://github.com/akavel/dali/tree/master/tests to see how using it looks like.

An example project with a simple .apk written purely in Nim (NO JDK) is at: https://github.com/akavel/hellomello/tree/flappy (unfortunately, given Nim's poor packaging story, it's most probably already bitrotten to the extent that it can't be quickly and easily built & used out of the box). I recorded a presentation about this for an online Nim conference — see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr9X5NCwPlI&list=PLxLdEZg8DR...

https://github.com/akavel/dali was one (a fully hand-written assembler for Android .apk files); I managed to write a rudimentary flappy-bird-like prototype in it and did a presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr9X5NCwPlI&list=PLxLdEZg8DR... but on shelf now, didn't get much attention, and I don't feel bad about it. Had some roadblocks, but managed to overcome them, and I'm honestly surprised how the core effort was basically easy to implement and how the formats were open and relatively simple. (The main real issues I had were that debugging via adb logs was tiresome when something was not working.) What was funny about this project was that I started it with basically a thought of: "there will be probably some annoying roadblock at some point that will make it unviable to continue; I accept that and will be ok with stopping once I stumble upon it; but I don't see one clearly from the start [I did some quick initial research how the formats & the bytecode look and they seemed rather simple], and I'm really curious how far I can get if I decide to not think about this possible roadblock". Turns out I was able to get all the way to the end :D

For a recent project I chose Yue (https://libyue.com/), a cross-platform native widget GUI toolkit with C++, JavaScript/Node.js, and Lua. I've only used the Lua interface and macOS backend, but it has worked quite well, despite the very steep learning curve. This was also my first desktop GUI app, so I had to learn many implicit concepts that weren't obvious from the otherwise extensive documentation.

Yue was also the only option that 1) supported macOS, 2) supported Lua, 3) was sufficiently comprehensive to build a non-toy GUI app, 4) and that I could integrate into my (static) build. I couldn't even get the wxWidgets Lua interfaces to compile, and Qt and Fltk had similar stories, whereas reverse-engineering the baroque Yue build (based on Google's internal build systems) was relatively simple. Yue had some sharp edges, but I was able to work around them whilst patiently waiting for patches and fixes upstream.

Immediate mode interfaces were a non-starter for me. For a non-trivial set of otherwise typical controls and window management you have to implement too much yourself, plus being non-native they not only felt wrong (which admittedly is somewhat subjective; the younger crowd seems to think non-native, immediate mode interfaces look more state-of-the-art), but lacked other interfaces for proper desktop integration, like theme change signaling (i.e. notification that a user switch between light and dark modes in the macOS system settings panel).

All-in-all I would highly recommend Yue.

I settled for Yue: https://github.com/yue/yue It's been around for several years. The deciding factor for me was that is has well maintained Lua bindings as part of the core project alongside JavaScript (Node.js) and C++.

I didn't have much luck with libui (crashes, missing features, etc), and various immediate mode alternatives just require too many dependencies and other work that made integration too painful. Plus, Lua bindings for all these were always stale. In fact, Lua binding quality is pretty poor all around including for GTK, Qt, WxWidgets, and FLTK.

There are many more JavaScript developers than C++ developers.

Personally I like Yue, a cross-platform native toolkit library: https://github.com/yue/yue But much of project was already using Lua, so Node.js and Electron were never viable solutions.

A native GUI library https://github.com/yue/yue.

It was a disaster when I announced it on Hacker News, and I got numerous harassments from strangers.

But anyway 2 years since then and I'm still working on it.