macdriver
webview
macdriver | webview | |
---|---|---|
13 | 68 | |
4,350 | 12,031 | |
- | 0.4% | |
7.9 | 8.4 | |
about 2 months ago | 10 days ago | |
Go | C | |
MIT License | MIT License |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
macdriver
- Are there native bindings for native UI development with Go? Window, GTK, MacOS
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Towards the Personal Potential of Software
The first big release of the year was the macdriver project, which got a significant response on Hacker News. It gives us Objective-C and Apple framework bindings for Go, letting you build simple Apple apps entirely from Go. That wasn't possible before, so it was a little exciting, but it was early. The native Go APIs included for commonly used Foundation and Cocoa classes were far from complete. They could still be used if you knew what you were doing, but with an ideal of total coverage of Apple frameworks, that wouldn't be enough. There were also unresolved issues just deciding how to best manage memory and pointers, which I knew would fall on me to figure out and take some time.
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Apple API schemas for code generation and more
Even less common are schemas for non-web APIs. In 2016, Electron started releasing a JSON schema of all their APIs that allowed me to build a bridge to use Electron APIs from Go. I had that prototype in mind when I started the macdriver project that was released a couple months ago. Right now we're manually wrapping Apple framework classes with Go types so you can write native Apple platform applications that look like this:
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Customize your computer screen with HTML
It started as a demo for macdriver, but over the last week or so I've been making a standalone version. 90% of that time was playing around with it while trying to make demos.
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Native Mac APIs for Go
Done https://github.com/progrium/macdriver/issues/12
webview
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Why Bloat Is Still Software's Biggest Vulnerability
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
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Ask HN: Do we still need Electron?
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
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Nui C++ User Interface Library
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.
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[Golang] Recommandation de bibliothèque d'interface utilisateur légère
WebView 7k
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Did you hear about using a web browser as GUI using C99?
You mean something like this?
- Desktop apps with golang
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Neutralinojs – Build lightweight cross-platform desktop apps with JavaScript
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
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The Quest for the Ultimate GUI Framework
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.
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(Hayami.app) A tile-based mini browser. You can pin webpages and files on a screen together. Not for deep reading but for having a quick look at the latest information at any time.
For example, you could use a native webview (Edge WebView2 for Windows and WebKit for MacOS/Linux), which uses much less RAM than Electron.
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Should web developers learn Flutter instead of React Native/Electron for mobile/desktop apps?
From a more established company with more guaranteed long-term support than the web frameworks that solve the above problems (like Tauri and Webview)
What are some alternatives?
appify - Create a macOS Application from an executable (like a Go binary)
fyne - Cross platform GUI toolkit in Go inspired by Material Design
micromdm - Mobile Device Management server
imgui - Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies
go-smc - Golang library to read and write the OSX System Management Controller (SMC)
Lorca - Build cross-platform modern desktop apps in Go + HTML5
go-pmset - Go library to get OSX assertions, like the command line pmset -g assertions
sciter - Sciter: the Embeddable HTML/CSS/JS engine for modern UI development
goplay2 - Airplay 2 Receiver written in Go
tauri - Build smaller, faster, and more secure desktop applications with a web frontend.
ludo - A libretro frontend written in golang
wry - Cross-platform WebView library in Rust for Tauri.