alchemy VS prost

1) This was started years ago back when SwiftUI had, frankly, a mountain of problems. I originally did the seeds of this work when building out Alchemy, a React clone for cross-platform apps in Rust. I sunset that project due to personal issues in my life at the time (relative dying) which had destroyed my motivation/time. I ultimately chose to extract the codebase and make cacao since it filled a necessary niche in the ecosystem.

Ah, yes - though I think we're still ultimately after the same thing. Cacao, while it tries to unify AppKit/UIKit APIs, more or less treats UIKit APIs as the "blessed" ones. A good example is the ListView component, which pretty much limits an NSTableView to the style and such that you'd find over on UITableView. cacao just has more working AppKit code due to it being originally the basis for alchemy.

Oh cool! Glad to hear it - I experimented with VDOM stuff long ago back in alchemy and considered returning to it at some point, but if someone else does it... well, it'd be hella cool.

We've been using Rust with protobuf, but had to write lots of conversions from protobuf struct to actual DTO, since prost generates Options for nested types, and does not really support custom types. So I extended prost with the options that we needed. I might aim to also support protoc-gen-validate.

I'm prototyping an alternative protobuf code generator, with the aim to support more configuration and options. Prost does not have any facilities for implementing extensions, so it's a fork with edits in every single component.