alchemy VS uikit-sys

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.

With uikit-sys, the build is very slow as it's all generated from bindgen and includes uikit as well as any of the framework dependencies required for it. I'm yet to figure out how to reduce how much stuff is generated as well as a reasonable way to wrap it in safe rust and ensure there's no memory leaks.

Nice! Welcome to the small group of rust iOS people! I'm the author of uikit-sys which really is just using the rarely used objective-c features of bindgen (plus an unmerged PR to bindgen) to generate bindings to to basically all the iOS objective-c frameworks.