Yue
sciter
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Yue | sciter | |
---|---|---|
8 | 85 | |
3,321 | 2,561 | |
2.4% | 0.1% | |
6.8 | 0.0 | |
15 days ago | 11 months ago | |
C++ | C++ | |
GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 only | - |
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
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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
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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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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.
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).
- Ask HN: Fastest cross-platform GUI stack/strategy
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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.
- 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:
- 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.
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Digital Audio Workstation Front End Development Struggles
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:
What are some alternatives?
Vaca - C++ Win32 wrapper to develop GUI apps
webview - Tiny cross-platform webview library for C/C++. Uses WebKit (GTK/Cocoa) and Edge WebView2 (Windows).
qt - Qt binding for Go (Golang) with support for Windows / macOS / Linux / FreeBSD / Android / iOS / Sailfish OS / Raspberry Pi / AsteroidOS / Ubuntu Touch / JavaScript / WebAssembly
tauri - Build smaller, faster, and more secure desktop applications with a web frontend.
flexboard - React component library for re-sizable sidebars
RmlUi - RmlUi - The HTML/CSS User Interface library evolved
NanoGUI - Minimalistic GUI library for OpenGL
imgui - Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies
Wails - Create beautiful applications using Go
libRocket - libRocket - The HTML/CSS User Interface library
fyne - Cross platform GUI toolkit in Go inspired by Material Design
go-astilectron - Build cross platform GUI apps with GO and HTML/JS/CSS (powered by Electron)