canonic VS cosmopolitan

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

The reality is a bit different, the work on Python 3.6 was checked into the Cosmopolitan repo and I have been able to use it for production workloads that are in pure python. [0]

As Cosmopolitan Libc has evolved, it has been possible to compile more software without modifications, and that includes latest Python through a project called superconfigure[1].

Last person who tried to reproduce it from scratch did it last week (granted it too them a few days of solid work) but in the end they ended with a portable binary with Python 3.11.9, brotli, ssl and asyncio for their work related project.[2]

[0] https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/tree/master/third_party...

Cosmopolitan https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan and https://justine.lol/cosmopolitan/index.html

Some genius realized that you can actually embed valid win32 programs inside valid posix shell scripts, and found a way to make a C cross-platform solution out of it, meaning that you can write C programs that compile to a single executable that will run on (quoting the site) Linux + Mac + Windows + FreeBSD + OpenBSD + NetBSD + BIOS

It all started from this post.

For this .args file, put one argument per line. This will run on start. You can use `/zip/mydepencency.anything` to read from files, but if you have an executable dependency you'll need to extract it first.

You can do this with any software you can compile with comsocc, by adding a call to LoadZipArgs[1] in the main function.

It'seasy to get started, your ideas will branch out as soon as you start playing with it.

[1]: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/tool/args/a...

FWIW there is ongoing work with good progress to add websocket support to redbean (https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/pull/967)

Check out this comment by jart (cosmpolitan author) here: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/issues/766#issuecomment...

it might help but not sure how comprehensive it is! would it be a bad idea for you to check out the source code of other popular emulators (maybe iTerm 2^0) ?

0: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Agnachman%2FiTerm2%20ansi&...

The binary was compiled with Cosmopolitan Libc [0], and therefore the binary will execute natively on Linux, Mac, Windows, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and bare metal (BIOS boot).

I would call that portable.

[0] https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan

will go on my "to try" list where i already have cosmopolitan [2]. my last setup (windows) was shiv + wine + nsis (used that as pyinstaller had some issues)[2]

[1] https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/issues/141#issuecomment...