xl VS Eel

From what I can read the author got really unlucky with some kind of radical API changes. Maybe at that time the LLVM team was a bit less serious with deprecations ?

I use LLVM since v9, nowadays I'm stuck on v15 (that's not because of LLVM btw).

Between the two versions there's been a radical change too, i.e "opaque pointers", but the transition was rather smooth as we were provided, for a long time, the two versions of the functions affected by the change. Maybe the LLVM team got more serious since the author experienced the said difficulties ?

Other thing I note is that the author uses the CPP API. I use the C one which exposes only a high-level subset of the CPP one. This encourages a saner use of LLVM, a more concrete separation between the front-end and the mid-end, although sometimes there are limitations.

A simple example of what encourages the C API, especially since opaque ptrs are added, is not to rely on LLVM to retrieve the IR type of an IR value. That should always be done using the AST, eg with an `.ir` field in your nodes.

Another one I remark, after a brief overview of LLVM-CRAP, is that the author had to change the internal data structure used, depending on the LLVM version [0]. Using the C API that would never had happened. The C API essentially allows to create block refs, instructions refs, value refs, type refs, contexts. Then you choose the containers you want to use to hold them. No need to switch to another stdcpp one, even if internally LLVM does so.

[0]: https://github.com/c3d/xl/blob/master/src/llvm-crap.cpp#L265

I gave up a long time ago attempting to write GUIs in pure python. I've come back to them periodically to see if the landscape has changed, but I'm always disappointed.

My current go-to python GUI solution is to use the Eel library. It renders GUIs in a web-browser like window with HTMl/CSS/JS.It lets you expose your python functions to JavaScript, so data can be easily transferred back and forth between the python and the JavaScript. And since it's just web-dev, it's pretty easy to make things look and feel good enough. Any other web-dev libraries like bootstrap and jquery can be used. It works pretty well for writing GUIs that put data analysis tools in front of my colleagues.

https://github.com/python-eel/Eel

Eel was used to implement the app and communication with the web interface.

I am calling a function from Python using eel and taking the return value. Python functions are asynchronous with JavaScript by nature. This code is combined with other variables to determine if the form can continue. allFilled() is called everytime the form field changes.

In the past, I've used QT4 and QT Designer. It was okay. It was a small mountain to climb for myself then - but certainly doable. However, there was a lot of generated code that wasn't the most concise thing. Today, I discovered Eel. Since I used QT4 in the past, I've done some web dev. Certainly, not proficient there. But Eel wasn't as big of a hurdle. In fact, it took me a fraction of the time because it is much like creating a basic website. Where there's an abundance of tutorials and tips out there for everything imaginable. Instead of downloading and adding a font, clicking through a bunch of dialogs. I just linked a Google font and updated the CSS. Stuff like that.

If you don't want a web-app, you can still use JS for GUI, using something like python-eel https://github.com/python-eel/Eel