swift-cross-ui VS libui-ng

For another SwiftUI-like wrapper, see also https://github.com/stackotter/swift-cross-ui (used by Adawaita to generate widgets, and mentioned in other comments).

The key premise of this approach is to provide a SwiftUI-like declarative wrapper around Gnome functionality. It's unclear what it adds over swift-cross-ui.

SwiftUI itself has growing pains mainly around being on the right thread for processing/updates and getting data binding right.

Blog entries on swift.org or from Apple tend to be little demos that show the happy path, but when discussing new frameworks (like a Gnome wrapper) or platforms (like the recent embedded), I'd like more demonstration that the authors understand and address key issues and will sustain development. Cross-platform UI frameworks get complicated quickly and have a long tail of issues (cf Flutter, Java/Eclipse, et al) that can be blockers for clients/users. For Swift it doesn't help to have multiple concurrency models and obviously different behaviors on apple platforms and Linux (where UI is not officially tested).

Some interesting stuff happening here [1] and here [2] too.

[1] https://github.com/stackotter/swift-cross-ui/tree/main

I remember a few years ago, a few really cool cross-platform UI libraries were starting to emerge such as libui [0] that got me excited. I've kind of lost track of them since then (libui itself went dormant for a while before this fork) so I am not sure how mature/useful they are now, but the potential for writing native desktop UIs in basically any language seemed like an absolute dream. Perhaps it's feasible for very basic things?

[0] https://github.com/libui-ng/libui-ng

Linux/Windows/MacOS: https://github.com/libui-ng/libui-ng

There are a few libraries for GUI (for example, capy), and you can easily use any C libraries out there with @cImport (like libui), but it is still a work in progress.

It exists, at least for simple use cases. You are looking for libui-ng. wxWidgets of course also exists, but it is less a basic native wrapper than it is a complete toolkit emulating what doesn't exist where as libui seems to be more lowest common denominator (not sure but I think there might be a small amount of emulation, but not like wx I don't think).

There's now libui-ng [1] which seems to be active and already has many wrappers

[1] https://libui-ng.github.io/libui-ng/