webview
sciter
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webview
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Why Bloat Is Still Software's Biggest Vulnerability
You can create the webview using each platforms native GUI toolkit and setup JS communication yourself OR you can use a lightweight library that does it for [1] (search its README for language "bindings").
[1] https://github.com/webview/webview
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Ask HN: Do we still need Electron?
Each platform has it's own webview control available as a shared library installed with the OS.
MacOS has WKWebKit based on WebKit.
Windows has WebView2 based on Edge/Chromium.
Linux has webkit2gtk based on WebKit.
Tools like Tauri use a simple cross-platform single-header abstraction called webview.h[1].
Electron no longer allows Node.js to be called from renderer processes, all communication with Node.js is done via IPC.
In this case, why do we still need Electron? Why does it have to be tied to V8/Node.js?
The fact that Chromium Embedded Framework exists and is third-party makes me think that Chromium wasn't designed for being embedded, and Electron is filling that gap.
This is elucidated here further here https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2:
> it's difficult to reuse their work...if another WebKit-based application or another port wanted to do multiprocess based on Chromium WebKit, it would be necessary to reinvent or cut & paste a great deal of code.
It makes me think that perhaps WebKit was the better choice for embedding. The fact that Node used V8 made Chromium the choice, and that Node being called from the renderer was the original way of working. Maybe because WebKit didn't have a build for Windows was an issue too...
But now that we have Bun, perhaps it's time that WebKit becomes that browser target of choice for desktop apps on macOS.
Unless WebView2 for macOS arrives, which would have a more sane cross-platform story. WebView2 has a very large feature-set though which make take a while to implement for macOS.
[1]: https://github.com/webview/webview/blob/master/webview.h
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Nui C++ User Interface Library
Nui could base on this in theory. Nui uses https://github.com/webview/webview under the hood, which provides browser windows for linux, windows or mac. Nui adds some cmake to make the "in-browser" and "main-process" part appear seemless, as well adding a DSEL for the "in-browser" view part.
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[Golang] Recommandation de bibliothèque d'interface utilisateur légère
WebView 7k
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Did you hear about using a web browser as GUI using C99?
You mean something like this?
- Desktop apps with golang
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Neutralinojs – Build lightweight cross-platform desktop apps with JavaScript
Golang can compile to windows statically, and on Windows those bindings are using the MSWebView2 API (aka Microsoft Edge webview).
I know that you can also compile the webview.cc into a dll specifically, and link against that. But I'd never done with Visual C++ because I am cross-compiling from Linux to Windows.
The README of the webview/webview project refers to the WebView2 SDK on NuGet, however [1]
[1] https://github.com/webview/webview#windows-preparation
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The Quest for the Ultimate GUI Framework
The author shrugs off web tech (maybe because of electron bloat?) but you can avoid the bloat by using each platforms native web browser control. There are even cross-platform libraries that make creating the native control and cross-communication simple. These applications would be architecturally similar to Win32 apps using and communicating with a XAML Island, but the advantage of web tech is it's an open standard and WPF/WinUI is not.
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(Hayami.app) A tile-based mini browser. You can pin webpages and files on a screen together. Not for deep reading but for having a quick look at the latest information at any time.
For example, you could use a native webview (Edge WebView2 for Windows and WebKit for MacOS/Linux), which uses much less RAM than Electron.
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Should web developers learn Flutter instead of React Native/Electron for mobile/desktop apps?
From a more established company with more guaranteed long-term support than the web frameworks that solve the above problems (like Tauri and Webview)
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?
fyne - Cross platform GUI toolkit in Go inspired by Material Design
qt - Qt binding for Go (Golang) with support for Windows / macOS / Linux / FreeBSD / Android / iOS / Sailfish OS / Raspberry Pi / AsteroidOS / Ubuntu Touch / JavaScript / WebAssembly
imgui - Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies
tauri - Build smaller, faster, and more secure desktop applications with a web frontend.
Lorca - Build cross-platform modern desktop apps in Go + HTML5
flexboard - React component library for re-sizable sidebars
RmlUi - RmlUi - The HTML/CSS User Interface library evolved
wry - Cross-platform WebView library in Rust for Tauri.
NanoGUI - Minimalistic GUI library for OpenGL
Wails - Create beautiful applications using Go