Elements C++ GUI library VS hikogui

There's a relatively new C++ GUI library literally called "Elements". Not sure how it works though, but the way it looks, and the music background of its creator makes it appear designed for DAWs.

https://github.com/cycfi/elements

Further, if you we want a "modern" C++ GUI framework what actually would be modern would be to use mechanisms in the language itself as a quasi-DSL from within the language. This is something like what Joel de Guzman is doing with Elements

It's a complex domain. The closest we have at the moment is Elements which hasn't been proposed for Boost (yet?) but is by Joel de Guzman, the primary author of Boost.Spirit.

Elements was mentioned as a specific example of an MIT-licensed GUI library on the CPPcast episode from 5 May 2022.

I ended up with elements gui https://github.com/cycfi/elements

If you don't want to use Qt I honestly think your best bet may be to become an early adopter of cycfi elements depending on your project. Elements is still rough but is useable for small applications. I think when it is finished it will be the best choice for a retained mode GUI library, but right now it is missing a lot of things (e.g. the standard common dialogs, "open", "Save as", etc.) , and has basically zero documentation.

github link

For the past year we were evaluating EFL, QML and Flutter for our embedded TV devices after having used the first two for last 5+ years and choice was made to go with Flutter. Performance is great, license is great, and development experience, judged by the whole development team, is the best. Hence my remark on being sad as QML could have had a great future, even transitioned to modern C++ without need for separate language, if there was a huge adoption and proper choices made by the company, e.g. see https://github.com/cycfi/elements.

### [Elements](https://github.com/cycfi/elements) (Formerly photon)

See my own implementation: https://github.com/hikogui/hikogui/blob/main/src/hikogui/concurrency/unfair_mutex.hpp

Look at all the pipeline_SDF source files at https://github.com/hikogui/hikogui/tree/main/src/hikogui/GFX

Here is the fragment shader: https://github.com/hikogui/hikogui/blob/main/shaders/pipeline_SDF.frag

Talking about styles; the color type now can both encode an RGBA (half float) value or a semantic color. A semantic color is a color that is used in a specific context and is specified in a theme. Just before rendering the semantic colors will be resolved to an RGBA value. This makes working with colors easier because there is only one type to worry about. I will be using the same technique for encoding semantic-text-style in a text-style in the future.

Here is the tool to create de-duplicated table and index table from the unicode database: https://github.com/hikogui/hikogui/blob/main/tools/generate_unicode_data.py

I haven't actually used either one, but there's HikoGUI (previously known as TTauri) under the Boost license and RmlUI under MIT. Not sure if they're very OS-integrated in the way you want or not.

Thank you for mentioning HikoGUI.

You may also want to look at: https://github.com/hikogui/hikogui/blob/main/src/hikogui/log.hpp