Wails VS sciter

This is basically the same tech stack of an app I’ve been planning to build, but deployed as a desktop application using Wails: https://github.com/wailsapp/wails

Wails 2.6k

The wails project does this when. You can check it out here https://github.com/wailsapp/wails/blob/master/v2/internal/typescriptify/typescriptify.go for inspection.

I have built Web front-ends (React or Svelte) with Go-backend. Embed in a web-view to make it a native desktop app, or get funky and give it native chrome/menus etc. [Wails](https://github.com/wailsapp/wails) is a good candidate to start if you want to cut on boiler plate.

Is that what wails is doing here? (On mobile)

In a "local" environment, where an executable can be provided to someone with the entire game contents. In this case, the game won't use WebSockets, and will instead use a Go/JS bridge (something like Wails) to connect.

Have you seen wails? https://github.com/wailsapp/wails

You should check out https://github.com/wailsapp/wails/pull/1959

> 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/

I did UI part of it.

Up until last year my Sciter ( https://sciter.com ) worked on WinCE.

Dropped support after my last customer that was using WinCE decided to drop support of that OS.

WinCE had pretty solid and stable core runtime and API. Graphics was limited by GDI (no antialiasing and alpha channel) but that was the only major problem.