Turbo Vision VS Elements C++ GUI library

For those curious, here is a modern port of the C++ Turbo Vision that also supports Unicode:

https://github.com/magiblot/tvision

Not exactly what you're looking for, but there's Shell in a Box (see https://github.com/shellinabox/shellinabox), that can create a terminal on a web page, and expose an actual terminal application running on a server.

One thing that is certainly doable is also to use a standard TUI framework in another language (there are many of them, e.g. https://github.com/magiblot/tvision for C++, https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea for Go, etc.), compile it to WASM, and find how to bridge the WASM output to the browser (I've seen this: https://github.com/cryptool-org/wasm-webterm, but never tried it).

With FPC, you can use Free Vision, which is a supposed to be like a remake of the old Borland Turbo Vision. Alternatively for C++.

Talking about a window display from byte array sounds like windowing for a purely text based (console based) user interface, like the 1990's Borland's old Turbo Vision. There are modern ports of Turbo Vision, e.g. superquick googling found one at GitHub.

there is also a port of the "original":

https://github.com/magiblot/tvision

A modern port of Turbo Vision 2.0, the classical framework for text-based user interfaces. Now cross-platform and with Unicode support.

There's a relatively new C++ GUI library literally called "Elements". Not sure how it works though, but the way it looks, and the music background of its creator makes it appear designed for DAWs.

https://github.com/cycfi/elements

Further, if you we want a "modern" C++ GUI framework what actually would be modern would be to use mechanisms in the language itself as a quasi-DSL from within the language. This is something like what Joel de Guzman is doing with Elements

It's a complex domain. The closest we have at the moment is Elements which hasn't been proposed for Boost (yet?) but is by Joel de Guzman, the primary author of Boost.Spirit.

I ended up with elements gui https://github.com/cycfi/elements

If you don't want to use Qt I honestly think your best bet may be to become an early adopter of cycfi elements depending on your project. Elements is still rough but is useable for small applications. I think when it is finished it will be the best choice for a retained mode GUI library, but right now it is missing a lot of things (e.g. the standard common dialogs, "open", "Save as", etc.) , and has basically zero documentation.

github link

For the past year we were evaluating EFL, QML and Flutter for our embedded TV devices after having used the first two for last 5+ years and choice was made to go with Flutter. Performance is great, license is great, and development experience, judged by the whole development team, is the best. Hence my remark on being sad as QML could have had a great future, even transitioned to modern C++ without need for separate language, if there was a huge adoption and proper choices made by the company, e.g. see https://github.com/cycfi/elements.