vgtk VS libui

A pretty fun Rust GUI experienc is vgtk[0], which is doing a bunch of macro magic to give a "we're coding in React" vibe to GTK+. I don't really have a specific thing I want to code in a native GUI at the moment but if I did I think this would be the most tempting for me.

[0]: https://github.com/bodil/vgtk/

a stateful GUI markup language is react. it is not yet the case that react-like code works for desktop, though there are cool examples like vgtk https://github.com/bodil/vgtk

from what i gather from https://github.com/bodil/vgtk/issues/78, you're better off using realm

I'm always curious to see these projects, because I've been experimenting with a React renderer for the GJS bindings for a while. It's frustrating because GTK "feels like" it's so close to being able to support a vdom/declarative paradigm, but the devil is in the details.

The simple use-cases like "Window > Box > Label" are easy to get going. The more complex widgets like Stack/Grid/TreeView ... aren't.

This project seems to have the same issue: https://github.com/bodil/vgtk/issues/40

This is made more difficult now GTK4 has removed the Container base class, so there's no longer a unified interface for adding children (although it had caveats in the first place).

I totally get the GTK view that (presumably) specific widgets are more intuitive with specific add/remove APIs (like the grid - one doesn't really "appendChild" to a grid).

It just feels like: if there was a consistent container API comparable to the web's appendChild approach, a vdom/declarative approach would require only a very light wrapper. Without it, I keep coming back to the idea of implementing wrapper widgets that expose that consistent API instead. And that's just not something I want to maintain - effectively duplicating each GTK widget for the purpose of making it fit into a tree model.

It's also a problem of trying to wrap richer functionality (pack_start and pack_end) into a simpler set (append only) of course.

So I don't know exactly what my point is :) Perhaps cautioning the reader that the simplicity of the approach comes with a catch.

A declarative desktop UI framework for Rust built on GTK and GTK-rs\ (23 comments)

Build your own To-do List Application in Rust: https://bodil.lol/vgtk/

You can kind of see the desktop UI train wreck in real time here.

We started with simple stable APIs for a common look and feel. For a while these were evolved and made available in other languages. This was back when native apps were consistent and intuitive and you could… uhh… actually write and ship them without bundling giant runtimes or checking a huge compatibility matrix.

Then around 2012 the train rounds the bend and screeeeech it hits some bad track and starts to derail. UI starts trying to emulate the web, a terrible UI platform, and sane compositional UI libraries and APIs are abandoned in favor of XML soup.

Since this stuff is a trash fire, this is followed by multiple incompatible attempts to replace or fix this. Most of these are abandoned dead ends.

Meanwhile the dev community just said fuck it and went to Electron, creating today’s world where a “hello world” app with an OK button is hundreds of megabytes and has to load an entire private copy of a language runtime and rendering engine.

Versions of this comedy of errors have occurred on every other platform, and of course there has been little effort to create a cross platform UI API that’s sane beyond Qt (with its own problems) and dozens of half completed OSS projects.

So enjoy Electron I guess.

There was one sane human being who tried to do this a while ago:

https://github.com/andlabs/libui

It’s the only sane desktop UI project I’ve seen in almost 20 years, an attempt to create an actual cross platform common API. But it’s abandoned of course, likely too difficult for one dev and nobody is going to provide financial support for anything that sane.

Maybe AI will get good enough some day that we can use it to do a thing like that.

What about https://github.com/andlabs/libui

Fantastic! This is similar to the C library `libui` since it also acts as a wrapper of native libraries of each platform.

If only there was a way to interface to these using some declarative minimal and highly opinionated programming language and paradigm...

https://github.com/andlabs/libui

For the GUI you will need a library or framework that interacts with your specifiv operating system and allows you to create windows and a canvas to which you can draw. You could give libui a chance.

libui-ng is a cross-platform GUI library with native widgets written in C. It is based on an earlier, (currently) inactive project known as libui. While Rust bindings for libui have existed for years (see ui-sys and iui), there is no solution for the new libui-ng; libui-ng-sys aims to fill this role.

libui

https://github.com/andlabs/libui is very nice, but unfortunately dead, if it serves your purpose consider using it, this is a fork under development https://github.com/libui-ng/libui-ng

https://github.com/andlabs/libui

Better yet, it has excellent DSLs that make it possible to build desktop apps in a way similar to HTML, but much better due to keeping all code dynamic in one language (no static/dynamic multi-language separation/mixing dissonance):

Maybe a module that uses https://github.com/andlabs/libui or a light HTML renderer?