psarm VS additive-guis

Thanks for the thoughtful response! Many of these are totally legitimate: in particular, we're making steady progress to centralize module design, release, documentation, and modernization, or at least to bring many teams closer together. In many cases, we're at a transition point between moving from traditional PS remoting modules and filling out PS coverage for newer OAuth / REST API flows.

I don't know how recently you've tried PS7, but the back-compat (particularly on Windows) is much, much better[1]. And for those places where compatibility isn't there yet, if you're running on Windows, you can just `Import-Module -UseWindowsPowerShell FooModule` and it'll secretly load out-of-proc in Windows PS.

Unfortunately, the .NET problems are outside my area. I'm definitely not the expert, but I believe many of the decisions around the default assembly load context are integral to the refactoring of .NET Core/5+. We are looking into building a generalized assembly load context that allows for "module isolation", and I'd love to get a sense in the issue tracking that[2] whether or not fixing that would help solve some of the difficulties you're having in building modules.

For Azure, you should check out the PSArm[3] module that we just started shipping experimentally. It's basically a PS DSL around ARM templates, as someone who uses PS and writes the Azure JSON, you sound like the ideal target for it.

As for the help content, that's a very funny story for another time :D

[1]: https://aka.ms/psmodulecompat

[2]: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/issues/2083

[3]: https://github.com/powershell/psarm

Start from an empty file and write to an imaginary API what you actually want to do and coding is easy!

But when you start from an existing codebase, existing infrastructure, it slows to molasses.

I'm an advocate and trying to design what I call "commutative programming", which is another way of saying that the behaviour is the product of every statement about the behaviour that is desired, not an explicit instruction of what to do next which is what modern programming is and it is slow and tedious and doesn't compose.

We need query engines for behaviour.

I started work on a commutative GUI https://github.com/samsquire/additive-guis but I'm also thinking from time to time about commutative code where we define refinements to desired behaviour and the computer query engine or rule engine generates the code that exhibits this behaviour.

For me desktop software feels extremely difficult to change and rearchitect to change swiftly.

A request/response server side application can be changed by adding endpoints, or redesigning or adding layers or database schemas but GUIs are hard to update easily by comparison because everything is so brittle and linked together so thoroughly.

I wrote toy proof of idea that GUIs could be additively defined declaratively. You define the layout by describing things in relationship to eachother rather than collection classes arranged in a tree. Behind the scenes, it IS a tree but in additive-guis in attempt to create GUIs that were responsive *to change of descriptions rather than declared positions*. you should be capable of describing the GUI with declarative description of how it should look *and* its behaviour.

https://github.com/samsquire/additive-guis

Writing code to manually maintain widgets in a hierarchy is error prone and slow to develop and adapt and change.

I worked on an Android mobile banking application and I wouldn't want to rearchitect the application.

I would love to understand Qt better but I find it very hard to understand to architect good software as a GUI.

I have looked into immediate mode GUIs.

I started writing a layout engine based on ORC Solver paper but it's very early days

https://github.com/samsquire/browser for a simple screenshot. It can arrange things without overlapping them, similar to a flow layout. But I need to handle text properly.

In some ways Mozilla achieved the impossible: a truly cross platform, compatible desktop application infrastructure that is powerful and rich. It can play video, show images and play sound and do 3D graphics. Unfortunately the market doesn't value those things, it thinks of them as dated. Firefox market share where it is.

Everyone said they wanted independent implementations of standards but when Google Chrome came out, everyone including web developers and engineers were happy to move to it.

There's just too much technical complexity and knowledge required to know how to do things on each platform. Writing a cross platform desktop application is LOTS of fiddly effort.

I've wanted to create a GUI similar to IntelliJ Community Edition but I worry that the code shall be outside my reach in understandability.

I wrote a GUI framework that uses React API directly.

It's more proof of concept than useable, the idea is that we don't actually have to write layouts, we can just describe the layout with code or a template language and let the computer work it out.

https://github.com/samsquire/additive-guis

https://github.com/samsquire/additive-guis