nodegui VS asm-dom

This looks like it hasn't been maintained in years but there's a modern equivalent in NodeGUI [1] which also has React/Svelte/Vue implementations. Unfortunately it requires a custom build of Node that merges the libuv and Qt6 event loops so YMMV.

It actually inspired me to write my own implementation with Svelte on top of QuickJS and Qt Widgets but the task of wrapping the entire Qt6 API in Rust proved to be intractable once I found out that most methods weren't marked Q_INVOKABLE and thus couldn't be called via reflection (requiring manual wrapping). Providing a `Document.createElement` API that created Qt Widgets with working attributes and event handling worked surprisingly well though!

[1] https://github.com/nodegui/nodegui

Hi, so this NodeGui library for building apps with native components is something I really want to get into, but, it does not work for me.. so I am starting this thread to check with yous (I depleted google results) if any one of you have tips or workarounds I can use. I wish to build a desktop app, but I really do not want to bundle a web browser for that purpose and NodeGui seems perfect.

Use NodeGui (or some equivalent tool) for this. Source: https://docs.nodegui.org/ This is needed because this entire project will run natively, by that I mean it will run with no browser, no local host and it no internet connection.

NodeGUI

Let's continue exploring Electron alternatives. This time, NodeGui. NodeGui uses Qt5 instead of Chromium, so we'll be leaving the familiar web development behind, but it tries to not be too far from it, as web development is what everyone knows.

(Disclaimer: My knowledge of Rust very limited, but I have quite a bit of experience with getting Qt/KDE classes to work with other languages.)

You are absolutely right. The effort to be acceptable bindings for Qt would be a tiny fraction of the cost compared to building a whole new Rust native GUI library.

Qt is huge set of libraries with an equally huge API. But there are a lot of shortcuts and smart ways of approaching the problem to get what you want out of Qt for minimum effort.

Bindings like PyQt and even PySide go for the nuclear option of generating bindings for the whole Qt API and trying to match the C++ API in style too. This is an absolutely massive huge task. Also, getting people to contribute to an open source bindings project is hard. Getting people to contribute to a bindings generator is even harder.

NodeGui https://github.com/nodegui/nodegui, Qt bindings for Nodejs, on the other hand takes a very different approach which in one way is low-tech but I think is actually very smart. I'll summerise the differences:

* It focuses on Qt Widgets first. This greatly reduces the amount of work to the parts that people actually need. (BTW, if you just want QML and Rust back-end then Jos van den Oever's work at https://invent.kde.org/sdk/rust-qt-binding-generator has probably got you covered already.)

There is actually a new GUI framework based out of Qt (a C++ GUI framework) that I have found recently : https://docs.nodegui.org/

Aside from Blazor there's already some other projects like Yew (rust), seed (rust), asm-dom (C++) and vugu (Go) and more that have decent followings and activity. A lot more (especially managed languages) are waiting for some features to come online like wasm GC and host bindings (direct wasm access to browser apis which includes the DOM). It'll take a bit of time, but it'll get there eventually.

FWIW if you look around, C++ and Rust libraries for DOM manipulation exist (I haven't searched for other languages which compile to WASM):

https://github.com/mbasso/asm-dom

https://github.com/sycamore-rs/sycamore

I think solving the problem of DOM access on the library level is exactly the right way to tackle this problem. The library user don't need to care about specific WASM features, and the library implementation can be simplified when those WASM features become available (and also implement per-browser fallback paths)

Wasm is already around for a while. There are probably some libs to access the dom and frameworks around that wrap the js part completely Found this after a short search https://github.com/mbasso/asm-dom Also Blazor seems to work fine, but didn't really test it beside playing around a little bit with it

Thanks for the kind words! :-) Yeah, you've got a good description of the use case for it. You give me too much credit though. :-) It's built on top of Emscripten, which handles a lot of the low-level bindings between C++ and the browser. Also, asm-dom helps fill in a big gap between C++ and the DOM.