canonic VS braid-spec

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/

Here's the website if you want to test it out: https://www.canonic.com

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

GitHub repo: https://github.com/canonic/canonic

Hi! I have a few questions:

1) What are the benefits of the reactive operating systems? Do you have any example use-cases that this does better than traditional approaches?

2) Do you find this related to functional reactive programming at all?

3) Since this is a model of concurrency with eventual consistency, do you see it benefitting from eventually-consistent OT or CRDT data types?

I am working on what might be a related model: https://braid.org and https://stateb.us. We are building a "distributed state abstraction", that we envision will end up in three places:

a) HTTP will upgrade from a state transfer to a state synchronization protocol

b) Applications will be separated into UIs on top of a "web of state" (see https://stateb.us/static/statebus-demo-3-31.mp4 ) and transition from web apps to app webs

c) Operating Systems will replace file systems with state systems; where local variables in memory can persist to disk without explicit read/write calls, and can be read/written across processes without programming overhead.

I am wondering if we are all looking at the same programming abstraction, but from different angles!

Thanks Lakshan!

I don't think my use-case is necessarily a good fit for edge functions. I am trying to achieve what Supabase realtime/multiplayer accomplishes, but generically. I participate informally with the https://braid.org IETF working group, which to over-simplify is CRDTs over HTTP with subscriptions.

I'm interested in web standards and that's what's drawn me to deno, so I'm super excited the more and more I see it being adopted. BroadcastChannel piques my interest because it is perfectly in that gray area of standardization-- it makes total sense on the client and we're on the cusp of discovering what that could look like for servers.

In deno deploy, all the instances of my service are able to be linked together by BroadcastChannel, which I'm viewing as a p2p-style architecture. Ultimately, I'm curious about how this works under the hood and if it would be possible to interoperate a BroadcastChannel between Deno Deploy, Supabase, and say a Raspberry Pi in my house.

I've gone on a bit of a tangent, but I think maybe I should get involved with the WinterCG, since now that I'm putting my thoughts to words-- seems like it fits their charter.

Yes! This is the approach we're taking at https://braid.org -- extending HTTP itself into a decentralized synchronization protocol, so that any application built on top of it can be decentralized.

Specifically, you can divide any application's protocol into two parts:

  - A data synchronization protocol

That doesn't work, because DELETE is defined to delete the entire resource. PUT is defined to replace the resource with the body, which would replace the resource with the patch. Only PATCH is defined to accept a patch and do something special with it.

Another option, though, is to use the Range-Patch spec from: https://github.com/braid-org/braid-spec

Your use-case sounds perfect for Braid: https://braid.org

This works like SSE, but is designed specifically to articulate changes to the state of HTTP/REST resources.

If you're in Javascript, you can use the braidify library: https://www.npmjs.com/package/braidify