winlamb VS sciter-js-sdk

The first thing that came into my mind was: why not simply go fully native, with the aid of something like WinLamb? Often you can roll your own custom controls quicker than a cross-platform library.

With WinLamb it's trivial: just create a field in the class.

However, if you still want to go Win32, this library is a thin wrapper which may save you a lot of time (and sanity). However, it's C++, not C.

I write C++ and raw Win32 for more than 20 years. I'm the author of this, and I'm rewriting my personal stuff in Rust just for fun.

I wrote a very thin C++11 wrapper for Win32 a few years ago, in case you're interested: WinLamb. It won't do everything, it just covers window creation and messaging, and leaves room to plug any other Win32 stuff on top of it.

Take a look at WinLamb source if you want to see how to build a native GUI.

Given my C++ Win32 background, the very first thing I tried was to write a native Win32 GUI app in Rust. It later became the WinSafe crate, which is strikingly similar to WinLamb C++ lib. The Rust experience was awesome. The correctness of the type system was something I really appreciated, things C++ cannot give you.

I write native Windows stuff sometimes, and I use Windigo, which I wrote based on my WinLamb C++ lib. It's a GUI system over raw Win32, so this has the disadvantage that you'll have to learn some Win32... but it has the advantage that you have the unleashed power of Win32 at your fingertips.

How tiny is the output? What is the API? (I couldn't find any documentation. I thought maybe it's in the Help menu in the app itself but all I found was this https://i.imgur.com/6puOMIe.png - On that note, what level of JS is supported? As far as I can tell it uses this https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk which is based on Fabrice Bellard's QuickJS ) Is there sound?

JavaScript & Electron Sciter!

Having normal procedural language for build automation is of course useful. That's for those 10% of cases when "standard" build DSL (make,CMake,etc.) simply do not have facilities.

But the rest of 90% tasks should have compact (easily readable) definitions.

I personally found that Premake5 has quite good balance for these tasks.

Premake files are plain .lua files and due to Lua syntax they are easily readable. And if needed you can call from them procedures defined in again Lua.

So typical project (multiplatform) definition looks pretty readable, for example one project from Sciter SDK:

https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/blob/main/premake5....

More details.

That's why in Sciter I've extended JSX with translation meta instruction @:

Note Tauri is full fledged Client/Server with WebView (client) is running in separate process with RPC between UI process and Rust code (Server).

For the comparison:

Standalone Sciter (scapp.exe, https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/tree/main/bin) takes ~8 MB of RAM (with minimal Cairo and GDI backends).

That's 20 times less than even Tauri.

WebView based solutions are not suitable for applets - small portable desktop applications.

scapp.exe ( Standalone sciter engine ) takes 45 Mb showing its default "about" document.

It does support , with limited support but still.

See: https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/tree/main/samples/c...

Sciter also supports immediate mode painting on any element (like in DearIMGUI):

    element.paintBackground = function(gfx) {