canonic VS sokol

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

I'm using Dear ImGui for my cross-platform code (which includes running in browsers):

- https://floooh.github.io/visual6502remix/

- https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/c64-ui.html

- (start these samples by clicking on the little "UI" icon) https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/

Platform abstraction is handled through the sokol headers: https://github.com/floooh/sokol

I wonder if using your library (https://github.com/floooh/sokol) instead of OpenGL will alleviate some of these issues for newcomers! There's already a sokol port of the learnopengl.com code (https://github.com/GeertArien/learnopengl-examples), so it shouldn't be too hard to match between the tutorial articles and these.

If you're looking for something like this, Sokol is a much simpler alternative:

https://github.com/floooh/sokol

It doesn't support vulkan though, but if that's important to you you're probably much better off just using vulkan directly since it's supported on all the major platforms.

All I can do is give you a couple of Github ticket links where users of my libraries stumbled over the issue (and with different symptoms):

- https://github.com/floooh/sokol/issues/376

- https://github.com/floooh/sokol/issues/404

- https://github.com/floooh/cimgui-sokol-starterkit/issues/6

We then added a dummy call to a no-op pthread function, so that users can better figure out that they need to use -pthread because now they get a linker error instead of a runtime crash or hang. This has since reduced the 'support overhead' quite a bit:

- https://github.com/floooh/sokol/pull/456

My stuff for instance:

https://github.com/floooh/sokol

...inspired by:

https://github.com/nothings/stb

But it's not so much about the build system, but requiring a separate C/C++ compiler toolchain (Rust needs this, Zig currently does not - unless the proposal is implemented).

I have never personally used it but I'm pretty sure sokol has an audio library that might be what you are after.

And I asked floooh for similar thoughts on making a website with sokol here: https://github.com/floooh/sokol/issues/825

It's not Rust and TS, instead C and JS, but Emscripten has a very nice way of integrating C/C++ and JS (you can just embed snippets of Javascript inside C/C++ source files), e.g. starting at this line, there's a couple of embedded Javascript functions which can be called like C functions directly from the "C side":

https://github.com/floooh/sokol/blob/4535a3b4be59eb912e77e04...