sciter VS quickjspp

> wondering if css and svg could be used as abstraction over graphics and UI libraries

There's another project called Sciter that uses CSS to target native graphics libraries: https://sciter.com

> I wonder how hard it was to implement css. I've heard it can be pretty complex.

It was hard, but the biggest barrier is the obscurity of the knowledge.

Text layout is the hardest, because working with glyphs and iterating them in reverse for RTL is brain-breaking. And line wrapping gets really complicated. It's also the most obscure because nobody has written down everything you need to know in one place. After I finished block layout early on, I had to stop for a couple of years (only working a few hours a week though) and learn all of the ins, outs, dos, and don'ts around shaping and itemizing text. A lot of that I learned by reading Pango's [1] source code, and a lot I pieced together from Google searches.

But other than that, the W3C specifications cover almost everything. The CSS2 standard [2] is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read. It's internally consistent, concise, and obviously the result of years of deliberation, trial and error. (CSS3 is great, but CSS2 is the bedrock for everything).

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/

otherwise, if we have only retained mode as in browsers, we will need to modify the DOM heavily and create temporary elements for handles.

[1] https://sciter.com

I've still never used it but I've long been curious about Sciter:

https://sciter.com

These bullet points are exactly what I did in Sciter (https://sciter.com)

- Windowing

-- Tabs

-- Menus

-- Painting

-- Animation

-- Text

-The compositor

-Handling input

-- Pointer input

-- Keyboard input

- Accessibility

- Internationalization and localization

- Cross-platform APIs

- The web view

- Native look and feel

On top of that DOM and CSS implementations to achieve declarative UI. And JS as a languuage behind UI - declarative in some sense way of defining UI behavior.

I'm not sure if it can support all the libraries but yes it can be used to make desktop apps. Theres also Sciter.

https://sciter.com/

I think that my Storage implementation that is built-in into JavaScript in QuickJS and Sciter is still unbeatable as an integrated JS Storage solution:

"custom version of React he publishes..."

It is not a a custom version of React but rather extension of DOM model by just these:

1. Native JSX support. In Sciter QuickJS was extended to support JSX literals out of the box: https://github.com/c-smile/quickjspp/blob/master/quickjs-jsx...

2. Native methods:

   - Element.patch(...JSX expression...) - native VDOM reconciliation implementation.

In fact 1.8 Mb is quite a lot for QuickJS.

Whole Sciter engine that includes as QuickJS as HTML/CSS engines is about 6 Mb.

My port of QuickJS [1] that also includes persistent storage (think of MongoDB built into JS) is 736 Kb on Windows.

[1] https://github.com/c-smile/quickjspp

I've added built-in persistence to QuickJS: https://github.com/c-smile/quickjspp/blob/master/storage/doc/introduction.md

I might go a little offtopic here. Any plans to integrate https://github.com/c-smile/quickjspp. That way you can target mobile platforms too. QT supports mobiles well

As for desktop only this is great. Great work. Many people are commenting on NodeGUI only. They have forgotten to mention how Svelte also contribytes to saving memory footprint and cpu cycles over other frameworks with a much easier way to write apps. Add a small learning curve to that.

I've added JSX to JS used in Sciter that allowed to have JSX available for Mithril and PReact