libui VS webview

You can kind of see the desktop UI train wreck in real time here.

We started with simple stable APIs for a common look and feel. For a while these were evolved and made available in other languages. This was back when native apps were consistent and intuitive and you could… uhh… actually write and ship them without bundling giant runtimes or checking a huge compatibility matrix.

Then around 2012 the train rounds the bend and screeeeech it hits some bad track and starts to derail. UI starts trying to emulate the web, a terrible UI platform, and sane compositional UI libraries and APIs are abandoned in favor of XML soup.

Since this stuff is a trash fire, this is followed by multiple incompatible attempts to replace or fix this. Most of these are abandoned dead ends.

Meanwhile the dev community just said fuck it and went to Electron, creating today’s world where a “hello world” app with an OK button is hundreds of megabytes and has to load an entire private copy of a language runtime and rendering engine.

Versions of this comedy of errors have occurred on every other platform, and of course there has been little effort to create a cross platform UI API that’s sane beyond Qt (with its own problems) and dozens of half completed OSS projects.

So enjoy Electron I guess.

There was one sane human being who tried to do this a while ago:

https://github.com/andlabs/libui

It’s the only sane desktop UI project I’ve seen in almost 20 years, an attempt to create an actual cross platform common API. But it’s abandoned of course, likely too difficult for one dev and nobody is going to provide financial support for anything that sane.

Maybe AI will get good enough some day that we can use it to do a thing like that.

What about https://github.com/andlabs/libui

Fantastic! This is similar to the C library `libui` since it also acts as a wrapper of native libraries of each platform.

If only there was a way to interface to these using some declarative minimal and highly opinionated programming language and paradigm...

https://github.com/andlabs/libui

For the GUI you will need a library or framework that interacts with your specifiv operating system and allows you to create windows and a canvas to which you can draw. You could give libui a chance.

libui-ng is a cross-platform GUI library with native widgets written in C. It is based on an earlier, (currently) inactive project known as libui. While Rust bindings for libui have existed for years (see ui-sys and iui), there is no solution for the new libui-ng; libui-ng-sys aims to fill this role.

libui

https://github.com/andlabs/libui is very nice, but unfortunately dead, if it serves your purpose consider using it, this is a fork under development https://github.com/libui-ng/libui-ng

https://github.com/andlabs/libui

Better yet, it has excellent DSLs that make it possible to build desktop apps in a way similar to HTML, but much better due to keeping all code dynamic in one language (no static/dynamic multi-language separation/mixing dissonance):

Maybe a module that uses https://github.com/andlabs/libui or a light HTML renderer?

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.

From a more established company with more guaranteed long-term support than the web frameworks that solve the above problems (like Tauri and Webview)