mcpelauncher-manifest VS Ultralight

Look at this https://github.com/minecraft-linux/mcpelauncher-manifest

You can technically play MCPE on Linux via MCPE Launcher (unofficial)

https://github.com/minecraft-linux/mcpelauncher-manifest this one worked for me!

Today, an unknown device showed up in my install options. It's a "tablet" with a name "Diy DIY_D001". When I googled it nothing came up. Only thing I recently logged in with my G account was mcpelauncher (https://github.com/minecraft-linux/mcpelauncher-manifest). Does anyone know what could it be?

There is https://github.com/minecraft-linux/mcpelauncher-manifest, which can run the Android JARs on MacOS or Linux (by shimming/implementing the Android APIs it uses), but a few months back one of the updates dramatically changed the rendering system, and the lone(?) MacOs/Linux maintainer of mcpelauncher is still catching up. See https://github.com/minecraft-linux/mcpelauncher-manifest/iss...

Until that breakage, I ran it quite successfully on MacOS (although it _did_ have occasional crashes)

Bedrock through MCPE linux launcher has very minimal CPU/GPU requirements. It runs smoothly on a 9 year old laptop with integrated graphics. To add to that, their friends run minecraft on their switches and ipads. This was great before renderdragon, which is causing problems with linux launcher support, but during lockdown they could play minecraft with their friends. Java really doesn't run as well.

Wait, I can't even run it on amd64 right now! It's stalled at this point: https://github.com/minecraft-linux/mcpelauncher-manifest/com...

[2] https://ultralig.ht/

Web rendering would be Blink, with V8 being the JavaScript engine. I believe they have their own UI rendering process.

I know of another company that does something similar for the UI process, but with WebKit instead as the base:

https://github.com/ultralight-ux/ultralight#rocket-dual-high...

What I'd really like to see with CEF et al, is JS being dropped, in favor of directly controlling the DOM from the host language. Then we could, for example, write a Rust (or Kotlin, Zig, Haskell, etc) desktop application that simply directly manipulated the DOM, and had it rendered by a HTML+CSS layout engine. Folks could then write a React-like framework for that language (to help render & re-render the DOM in an elegant way).

Ultralight (https://ultralig.ht/) looks pretty cool. I think another possible option is Servo (https://github.com/servo/servo) – it was abandoned by Mozilla along with Rust during their layoffs a while back (but the project still seems to have a decent bit of activity). It would be great if some group of devs could revive the project, or a company could fund such a revival.

Eventually, we'll need to reflect on, and explore whether HTML+CSS is really the best way to do layout, and we could maybe perhaps consider proting the Android/iOS layout approach over to desktop.

I'm curious if the project will be open-source or do you have plans to go the Awesomium/Ultralight route with both open/closed sources and volume licenses? Or do you plan to offer commercial support services like other open source software?

I’m not tied to any language, but it needs to be able to wrap a c++ library. I started with .NET 7 MAUI - no linux support & very mobile focused. Tried out Electron. Wins on ease and usability, but has massive overhead. (Basic “Hello world” executable compiled to over 200mb) I then discovered Ultralight (https://ultralig.ht/). Big win on size, but was last updated 3 years ago.

tauri exists or if you wanted to ultralig.ht

I agree web stuff is really the best way to develop UIs. Good luck making responsive stuff in C++ for example. The paradigm of HTML, CSS, and JS is extremely powerful and even allows you to use canvas, webgpu, wasm.

There are multiple commercial projects that use web dev paradigm for GUIs:

https://coherent-labs.com/

https://ultralig.ht/

https://sciter.com/

Nice review, thanks! There are also: Ultralight (based on Webkit), LiteHTML, Tkhtml3 and Lobo Evolution. See also timeline of web engines.