sciter-js-sdk VS sciter

How tiny is the output? What is the API? (I couldn't find any documentation. I thought maybe it's in the Help menu in the app itself but all I found was this https://i.imgur.com/6puOMIe.png - On that note, what level of JS is supported? As far as I can tell it uses this https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk which is based on Fabrice Bellard's QuickJS ) Is there sound?

Having normal procedural language for build automation is of course useful. That's for those 10% of cases when "standard" build DSL (make,CMake,etc.) simply do not have facilities.

But the rest of 90% tasks should have compact (easily readable) definitions.

I personally found that Premake5 has quite good balance for these tasks.

Premake files are plain .lua files and due to Lua syntax they are easily readable. And if needed you can call from them procedures defined in again Lua.

So typical project (multiplatform) definition looks pretty readable, for example one project from Sciter SDK:

https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/blob/main/premake5....

More details.

That's why in Sciter I've extended JSX with translation meta instruction @:

Note Tauri is full fledged Client/Server with WebView (client) is running in separate process with RPC between UI process and Rust code (Server).

For the comparison:

Standalone Sciter (scapp.exe, https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/tree/main/bin) takes ~8 MB of RAM (with minimal Cairo and GDI backends).

That's 20 times less than even Tauri.

WebView based solutions are not suitable for applets - small portable desktop applications.

scapp.exe ( Standalone sciter engine ) takes 45 Mb showing its default "about" document.

Check this example of native object: https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/blob/main/demos/int...

So you really don't need V8 JIT infrastructure to achieve max performance - just add native objects when needed.

> wondering if css and svg could be used as abstraction over graphics and UI libraries

There's another project called Sciter that uses CSS to target native graphics libraries: https://sciter.com

> I wonder how hard it was to implement css. I've heard it can be pretty complex.

It was hard, but the biggest barrier is the obscurity of the knowledge.

Text layout is the hardest, because working with glyphs and iterating them in reverse for RTL is brain-breaking. And line wrapping gets really complicated. It's also the most obscure because nobody has written down everything you need to know in one place. After I finished block layout early on, I had to stop for a couple of years (only working a few hours a week though) and learn all of the ins, outs, dos, and don'ts around shaping and itemizing text. A lot of that I learned by reading Pango's [1] source code, and a lot I pieced together from Google searches.

But other than that, the W3C specifications cover almost everything. The CSS2 standard [2] is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read. It's internally consistent, concise, and obviously the result of years of deliberation, trial and error. (CSS3 is great, but CSS2 is the bedrock for everything).

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/

otherwise, if we have only retained mode as in browsers, we will need to modify the DOM heavily and create temporary elements for handles.

[1] https://sciter.com

I've still never used it but I've long been curious about Sciter:

https://sciter.com

These bullet points are exactly what I did in Sciter (https://sciter.com)

- Windowing

-- Tabs

-- Menus

-- Painting

-- Animation

-- Text

-The compositor

-Handling input

-- Pointer input

-- Keyboard input

- Accessibility

- Internationalization and localization

- Cross-platform APIs

- The web view

- Native look and feel

On top of that DOM and CSS implementations to achieve declarative UI. And JS as a languuage behind UI - declarative in some sense way of defining UI behavior.

I'm not sure if it can support all the libraries but yes it can be used to make desktop apps. Theres also Sciter.

https://sciter.com/

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/