Azul VS libui

Not sure what you mean but WebRender powers Firefox which definitely works on the desktop.

You can use it to build desktop UI frameworks - see for example https://azul.rs/

I'd been wanting to see this, preferably with JS being optional, and just allowing direct DOM access.

I initially thought this was what Azul was, but it's only just using Servo's WebRender compositor, and rolls its own CSS parser, DOM, and layout engine, so it doesn't benefit from most of the work done on Servo, and supports less CSS features.

https://github.com/fschutt/azul

Both Servo and Fifefox make use of webrender, which is an awesome piece of tech and is well suited to render a web page. Some GUI projects attempted to use webrender directly as well, like Azul and moxie-native

> But no one is saying, "Hey I have a CSS 2.1 compliant rasterizer and compositor that you can use in your C++ or Rust environment!" are they?

There’s actually quite a lot of interesting work going on in that general space, has been in various forms for some years. A couple that immediately spring to mind:

• Azul <https://azul.rs/> builds on WebRender, as used in Firefox. I haven’t looked at it for a few years, but it looks to have grown quite interesting now.

• Blitz <https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz> is based on from-scratch implementations of CSS layout and rendering, and wgpu rendering. It’s not usable yet, but is a very interesting concept. If one happens to be familiar with React Native: it’s kinda like that, or React Native Web.

Azul[1] was my solution for that, it was based on WebRender. I didn't get around to finish it in 2019, but I will work on it this year, maybe I'll get it to be mature enough to post it here.

> wide portability (at least Windoze, Linux, MacOS, iOS, Android, embedded: Azul is Windows-Linux-Mac only, don't underestimate the effort to properly port something to a new platform

> "though a Vulkan-based renderer can be made to run pretty much anywhere": WebRender is OpenGL + using software rendering as a fallback

> a permissive open source license: MPL-2.0

> a C interface/wrap to allow a wide programming language binding support: yes

> and an easily extensible and themable set of basic widgets: also yes

[1] https://azul.rs/

There is Iced which is used by system76 in Pop!_OS, Druid [DISCONTINUED], GTK-rs, Relm, Azul and Tauri. Personally I would use Tauri for its speed using the OS's native web render, documentation of use with things such as Sveltekit and the ability to make UI's using JS, CSS and HTML. Tauri similarly to Electron whilst being far faster. But its up to personal preference really. There aren't any solid "go to" options at the moment.

Sounds like you may be interested in azul not exactly servo based but on projects that originate from servo. Also this is not a typical WebView, for example it does not use HTML but uses DOM to define it's UI, and there is no JS engine in there.

Azul uses webrender. But your "glue" program is like half the web browser. You also need a vector graphics library to render websites. Webrender only does boxes, but not complex SVG paths. Once the plan was to use pathfinder, but mozilla fired the dev and they still using an old version of chromium's skia for that.

One day I'll get around to finish my library Azul [1]. Hopefully.

[1] https://azul.rs/

azul

You can kind of see the desktop UI train wreck in real time here.

We started with simple stable APIs for a common look and feel. For a while these were evolved and made available in other languages. This was back when native apps were consistent and intuitive and you could… uhh… actually write and ship them without bundling giant runtimes or checking a huge compatibility matrix.

Then around 2012 the train rounds the bend and screeeeech it hits some bad track and starts to derail. UI starts trying to emulate the web, a terrible UI platform, and sane compositional UI libraries and APIs are abandoned in favor of XML soup.

Since this stuff is a trash fire, this is followed by multiple incompatible attempts to replace or fix this. Most of these are abandoned dead ends.

Meanwhile the dev community just said fuck it and went to Electron, creating today’s world where a “hello world” app with an OK button is hundreds of megabytes and has to load an entire private copy of a language runtime and rendering engine.

Versions of this comedy of errors have occurred on every other platform, and of course there has been little effort to create a cross platform UI API that’s sane beyond Qt (with its own problems) and dozens of half completed OSS projects.

So enjoy Electron I guess.

There was one sane human being who tried to do this a while ago:

https://github.com/andlabs/libui

It’s the only sane desktop UI project I’ve seen in almost 20 years, an attempt to create an actual cross platform common API. But it’s abandoned of course, likely too difficult for one dev and nobody is going to provide financial support for anything that sane.

Maybe AI will get good enough some day that we can use it to do a thing like that.

What about https://github.com/andlabs/libui

Fantastic! This is similar to the C library `libui` since it also acts as a wrapper of native libraries of each platform.

If only there was a way to interface to these using some declarative minimal and highly opinionated programming language and paradigm...

https://github.com/andlabs/libui

For the GUI you will need a library or framework that interacts with your specifiv operating system and allows you to create windows and a canvas to which you can draw. You could give libui a chance.

libui-ng is a cross-platform GUI library with native widgets written in C. It is based on an earlier, (currently) inactive project known as libui. While Rust bindings for libui have existed for years (see ui-sys and iui), there is no solution for the new libui-ng; libui-ng-sys aims to fill this role.

libui

https://github.com/andlabs/libui is very nice, but unfortunately dead, if it serves your purpose consider using it, this is a fork under development https://github.com/libui-ng/libui-ng

https://github.com/andlabs/libui

Better yet, it has excellent DSLs that make it possible to build desktop apps in a way similar to HTML, but much better due to keeping all code dynamic in one language (no static/dynamic multi-language separation/mixing dissonance):

Maybe a module that uses https://github.com/andlabs/libui or a light HTML renderer?