hikogui VS Elements C++ GUI library

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

Yes, it is an open source project for a cross platform retained GUI library with a modern c++20 API. https://github.com/hikogui/hikogui

With some growing pains on configuring CMake, I was able to converted a single header file in my project github.com/hikogui/hikogui/ to a module interface file, but it hit an ICE immediately. Of course I reported it, including a crash dump, and a project-branch.

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

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

Thank you for mentioning HikoGUI.

On windows, you can even use just-in-time-debugging (enabled with registry key), which brings up a dialogue when the application crashes to select a debugger to attach to the "crashed" application. But for this to work correctly you need to do some fanzy things. See: https://github.com/hikogui/hikogui/blob/main/src/hikogui/debugger.hpp and https://github.com/hikogui/hikogui/blob/main/src/hikogui/debugger_win32.cpp

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.

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.