FLTK VS webview

Another dark horse is FLTK: https://www.fltk.org/. For utilities this might be your best choice, especially because static linking is supported. This is mostly a C++ solution but there are bindings to other solutions.

Fl_Flex (shameless plug!) is now officially in upstream FLTK since 1.4 for a "flexbox style" layout manager.

Go ahead and sell an FLTK product then. I'm sure you go to https://www.fltk.org/ and think those GUI's look awesome you delusional moron

FLTK

A few examples: Dear ImGui, SFML, FLTK. Probably even Tk could be used.

FLTK (Fast Light Toolkit) is a lightweight, cross-platform supported toolkit for building GUIs. FLTK is supported on Windows, macOS, and UNIX systems and was originally built for C++. If you use the FLTK toolkit to create a GUI application, the application looks the same on all supported operating systems.

There are a lot of options and they're not that hard to find... Qt, wxWidgets, FLTK, IUP come immediately to mind.

FLTK. It's a cross-platform C++ GUI toolkit for UNIX®/Linux® (X11), Microsoft® Windows®, and MacOS® X.

You can create the webview using each platforms native GUI toolkit and setup JS communication yourself OR you can use a lightweight library that does it for [1] (search its README for language "bindings").

[1] https://github.com/webview/webview

Each platform has it's own webview control available as a shared library installed with the OS.

MacOS has WKWebKit based on WebKit.

Windows has WebView2 based on Edge/Chromium.

Linux has webkit2gtk based on WebKit.

Tools like Tauri use a simple cross-platform single-header abstraction called webview.h[1].

Electron no longer allows Node.js to be called from renderer processes, all communication with Node.js is done via IPC.

In this case, why do we still need Electron? Why does it have to be tied to V8/Node.js?

The fact that Chromium Embedded Framework exists and is third-party makes me think that Chromium wasn't designed for being embedded, and Electron is filling that gap.

This is elucidated here further here https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2:

> it's difficult to reuse their work...if another WebKit-based application or another port wanted to do multiprocess based on Chromium WebKit, it would be necessary to reinvent or cut & paste a great deal of code.

It makes me think that perhaps WebKit was the better choice for embedding. The fact that Node used V8 made Chromium the choice, and that Node being called from the renderer was the original way of working. Maybe because WebKit didn't have a build for Windows was an issue too...

But now that we have Bun, perhaps it's time that WebKit becomes that browser target of choice for desktop apps on macOS.

Unless WebView2 for macOS arrives, which would have a more sane cross-platform story. WebView2 has a very large feature-set though which make take a while to implement for macOS.

[1]: https://github.com/webview/webview/blob/master/webview.h

Nui could base on this in theory. Nui uses https://github.com/webview/webview under the hood, which provides browser windows for linux, windows or mac. Nui adds some cmake to make the "in-browser" and "main-process" part appear seemless, as well adding a DSEL for the "in-browser" view part.

WebView 7k

You mean something like this?

Golang can compile to windows statically, and on Windows those bindings are using the MSWebView2 API (aka Microsoft Edge webview).

I know that you can also compile the webview.cc into a dll specifically, and link against that. But I'd never done with Visual C++ because I am cross-compiling from Linux to Windows.

The README of the webview/webview project refers to the WebView2 SDK on NuGet, however [1]

[1] https://github.com/webview/webview#windows-preparation

The author shrugs off web tech (maybe because of electron bloat?) but you can avoid the bloat by using each platforms native web browser control. There are even cross-platform libraries that make creating the native control and cross-communication simple. These applications would be architecturally similar to Win32 apps using and communicating with a XAML Island, but the advantage of web tech is it's an open standard and WPF/WinUI is not.

For example, you could use a native webview (Edge WebView2 for Windows and WebKit for MacOS/Linux), which uses much less RAM than Electron.