bppgrid
canonic
bppgrid | canonic | |
---|---|---|
2 | 14 | |
75 | 117 | |
- | 3.4% | |
4.1 | 3.8 | |
6 months ago | 5 months ago | |
C++ | C++ | |
MIT License | GNU General Public License v3.0 only |
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bppgrid
canonic
- Notes on WebAssembly
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Why aren't devs making desktop apps any more
I just founded a company where we're building a cross-platform native desktop app. Perhaps given we're on HN we can scope this to ask why aren't any _startups_ building native desktop apps?
It's something I wonder about as well. We're building real-time performance critical software, so we don't have much of an alternative. Given these constraints, we also ruled out Electron, Avalonia, React Native early on.
We're using Qt Quick which doesn't get nearly the love it should. I was a web developer for 5 years in a past life, and I'm pretty blown away by how pleasant and well-designed Qt Quick's QML language is. One of our team members created Canonic, https://www.canonic.com to explore how the web might look if QML was used as the document markup for the web.
The popular opinion around Qt Quick is that it is best suited for mobile or embedded projects with a dynamic UI, animations, etc. But over the last few years, it has really become a great desktop solution – to the point where Qt put Widgets into maintenance mode and is focusing efforts on Qt Quick across desktop, mobile and embedded targets.
With Qt 6, the GUI is drawn using native graphics acceleration: Metal on macOS, DirectX11 on Windows, Vulkan on Linux. This makes it really easy to bring in a texture you're drawing in some other piece of code outside of Qt. As a result, the QtMultimedia framework in Qt6 is zero-copy on most platforms with the FFmpeg backend. Frames get decoded if a GPU HW decoder is available, then this texture can be read directly by QtQuick and then rendered by the display server without ever being copied. I don't think there's a single other cross platform framework out there that achieves the same level of usability, performance and easy access to platform native APIs.
Here are just a few non-trivial desktop apps that come to mind using Qt Quick:
- Denon Engine DJ - https://enginedj.com/
- Mark Nottingham: Server-Sent Events, WebSockets, and HTTP
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I heard you like browsers. So I built a browser that runs in your browser via WASM (for QML instead of HTML)
Here's the website if you want to test it out: https://www.canonic.com
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A Response to Rich Harris
No, the end goal is to have an entirely separate browser which browses website built with all instead of html / js / css ; since Qt compiles to WASM it's a simple way to try it but the actual thing exists as a standalone desktop app: https://github.com/canonic/canonic
- Canonic Browser: open-source QML Browser
- Canonic Browser – Open-Source QML Web Browser
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Canonic Browser | Open Source QML Web Browser
GitHub repo: https://github.com/canonic/canonic
What are some alternatives?
qzxing - Qt/QML wrapper library for the ZXing library. 1D/2D barcode image processing library
pushpin - A proxy server for adding push to your API, used at the core of Fastly's Fanout service
cleardental
braid-spec - Working area for Braid extensions to HTTP
zotonic_mod_teleview - Mod teleview provides live updating server rendered views.
zotonic_mod_doom_fire
KittehPlayer - A video player based on Qt, QML and libmpv with themes for many online video players.
unpoly - Progressive enhancement for HTML
dotherside - C language library for creating bindings for the Qt QML language
htmx-trello - A Trello clone in htmx
styx - Simple, high-performance event streaming broker
knockout - Knockout makes it easier to create rich, responsive UIs with JavaScript