Yue
Elements C++ GUI library
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Yue | Elements C++ GUI library | |
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8 | 13 | |
3,323 | 2,903 | |
2.5% | - | |
6.8 | 9.5 | |
17 days ago | 2 days ago | |
C++ | C++ | |
GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 only | The MIT License |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
Yue
- This year in Servo: over 1000 pull requests and beyond
- Yue: A library for creating native cross-platform GUI apps
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So you want to write a GUI framework (2021)
For a recent project I chose Yue (https://libyue.com/), a cross-platform native widget GUI toolkit with C++, JavaScript/Node.js, and Lua. I've only used the Lua interface and macOS backend, but it has worked quite well, despite the very steep learning curve. This was also my first desktop GUI app, so I had to learn many implicit concepts that weren't obvious from the otherwise extensive documentation.
Yue was also the only option that 1) supported macOS, 2) supported Lua, 3) was sufficiently comprehensive to build a non-toy GUI app, 4) and that I could integrate into my (static) build. I couldn't even get the wxWidgets Lua interfaces to compile, and Qt and Fltk had similar stories, whereas reverse-engineering the baroque Yue build (based on Google's internal build systems) was relatively simple. Yue had some sharp edges, but I was able to work around them whilst patiently waiting for patches and fixes upstream.
Immediate mode interfaces were a non-starter for me. For a non-trivial set of otherwise typical controls and window management you have to implement too much yourself, plus being non-native they not only felt wrong (which admittedly is somewhat subjective; the younger crowd seems to think non-native, immediate mode interfaces look more state-of-the-art), but lacked other interfaces for proper desktop integration, like theme change signaling (i.e. notification that a user switch between light and dark modes in the macOS system settings panel).
All-in-all I would highly recommend Yue.
- WxWidgets 3.2.0 Released
- Yue – A library for creating native cross-platform GUI apps
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Gtk4 Tutorial
I settled for Yue: https://github.com/yue/yue It's been around for several years. The deciding factor for me was that is has well maintained Lua bindings as part of the core project alongside JavaScript (Node.js) and C++.
I didn't have much luck with libui (crashes, missing features, etc), and various immediate mode alternatives just require too many dependencies and other work that made integration too painful. Plus, Lua bindings for all these were always stale. In fact, Lua binding quality is pretty poor all around including for GTK, Qt, WxWidgets, and FLTK.
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Portal Windows for Electron
There are many more JavaScript developers than C++ developers.
Personally I like Yue, a cross-platform native toolkit library: https://github.com/yue/yue But much of project was already using Lua, so Node.js and Electron were never viable solutions.
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What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?
A native GUI library https://github.com/yue/yue.
It was a disaster when I announced it on Hacker News, and I got numerous harassments from strangers.
But anyway 2 years since then and I'm still working on it.
Elements C++ GUI library
- declarative GUI libraries
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Digital Audio Workstation Front End Development Struggles
There's a relatively new C++ GUI library literally called "Elements". Not sure how it works though, but the way it looks, and the music background of its creator makes it appear designed for DAWs.
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Introducing Slint 1.0 - The Next-Generation GUI Toolkit with C++20 APIs
Further, if you we want a "modern" C++ GUI framework what actually would be modern would be to use mechanisms in the language itself as a quasi-DSL from within the language. This is something like what Joel de Guzman is doing with Elements
- Can I include cycfi/elements with CMake in any project or must I build up on example projects?
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Boost.URL ACCEPTED, get the beta now!
It's a complex domain. The closest we have at the moment is Elements which hasn't been proposed for Boost (yet?) but is by Joel de Guzman, the primary author of Boost.Spirit.
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Is there any MIT/BSD licensed UI framework for C++ ?
I ended up with elements gui https://github.com/cycfi/elements
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GUI for software, not games, but lighter than Qt ?
If you don't want to use Qt I honestly think your best bet may be to become an early adopter of cycfi elements depending on your project. Elements is still rough but is useable for small applications. I think when it is finished it will be the best choice for a retained mode GUI library, but right now it is missing a lot of things (e.g. the standard common dialogs, "open", "Save as", etc.) , and has basically zero documentation.
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What are you using for GUIs?
github link
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Why I choose Electron even when I wanted to use QT
For the past year we were evaluating EFL, QML and Flutter for our embedded TV devices after having used the first two for last 5+ years and choice was made to go with Flutter. Performance is great, license is great, and development experience, judged by the whole development team, is the best. Hence my remark on being sad as QML could have had a great future, even transitioned to modern C++ without need for separate language, if there was a huge adoption and proper choices made by the company, e.g. see https://github.com/cycfi/elements.
What are some alternatives?
Vaca - C++ Win32 wrapper to develop GUI apps
imgui - Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies
NanoGUI - Minimalistic GUI library for OpenGL
tauri - Build smaller, faster, and more secure desktop applications with a web frontend.
libui - Simple and portable (but not inflexible) GUI library in C that uses the native GUI technologies of each platform it supports.
lvgl - Embedded graphics library to create beautiful UIs for any MCU, MPU and display type.
Turbo Vision - A modern port of Turbo Vision 2.0, the classical framework for text-based user interfaces. Now cross-platform and with Unicode support.
sciter - Sciter: the Embeddable HTML/CSS/JS engine for modern UI development
wxWidgets - Cross-Platform C++ GUI Library
nana - a modern C++ GUI library