timl
sciter
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timl
- TimL: Clojure-like Lisp dialect that runs on and compiles down to Vimscript
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Servo, the parallel browser engine written in Rust
A quick test-run on the pages linked from the hackernews front page:
hackernews svg logo doesn't render
youtube embed on the servo homepage doesn't load
https://github.com/tpope/timl -> reloads/rerenders infinitely, uses 100% of 1 core
https://akrzemi1.wordpress.com/2023/04/23/the-obvious-final-... -> hangs while loading the page, uses 100% of 1 core
https://equalitytime.github.io/FlowersForTuring/ -> loads/renders fine
https://github.com/reactos/reactos -> reloads/rerenders infinitely, uses 100% of 1 core
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2023/05/27/dolphin-steam-indefi... -> loads fine but css rendering/placement is off on breadcrumbs and article
https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2023/05/23/new-xen-updates-on-risc-v... -> very long load then hangs while loading javascript/content.
Not a great batting average - seems like sites need to be purpose built for this or leverage little/no modern javascript libraries for it to render accurately. Servo has been in this state for the last 5 or 6 years since I first discovered it.
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Let it snow in Emacs! (now with wind, varying intensity, and accumulation on terrain)
Hey, they have a lisp, it’s a start!
sciter
- Show HN: Open Source TailwindCSS UI Components
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Show HN: Dropflow, a CSS layout engine for node or <canvas>
> 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/
- Ask HN: Fastest cross-platform GUI stack/strategy
- Bringing Back Horizontal Rules in HTML Select Elements
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Immediate Mode GUI Programming
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
- This year in Servo: over 1000 pull requests and beyond
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Rusty revenant Servo returns to render once more
I've still never used it but I've long been curious about Sciter:
https://sciter.com
- Ode to the M1
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So you want to write a GUI framework (2021)
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.
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Servo, the parallel browser engine written in Rust
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/
What are some alternatives?
pathfinder - A fast, practical GPU rasterizer for fonts and vector graphics
webview - Tiny cross-platform webview library for C/C++. Uses WebKit (GTK/Cocoa) and Edge WebView2 (Windows).
reactos - A free Windows-compatible Operating System
qt - Qt binding for Go (Golang) with support for Windows / macOS / Linux / FreeBSD / Android / iOS / Sailfish OS / Raspberry Pi / AsteroidOS / Ubuntu Touch / JavaScript / WebAssembly
aniseed - Neovim configuration and plugins in Fennel (Lisp compiled to Lua)
tauri - Build smaller, faster, and more secure desktop applications with a web frontend.
Servo - Servo, the embeddable, independent, memory-safe, modular, parallel web rendering engine
flexboard - React component library for re-sizable sidebars
snow.el - Let it snow in Emacs!
RmlUi - RmlUi - The HTML/CSS User Interface library evolved
NanoGUI - Minimalistic GUI library for OpenGL