Yue VS NanoGUI

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.

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.

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.

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.

NanoGUI

With 2.5 days you probably don't want anything that requires much setup, so Qt is probably a non-starter. You could try this one: https://github.com/wjakob/nanogui, the examples are not the platonic ideal of modern C++ programming, but that also means you don't need much mastery of the language to hammer a program until it has a GUI.

I've dipped my toes into GUI development just enough to know you can have "simple," or you can have "native," but not both. There are smaller projects like nanogui[0] and microgui[1] out there, but of course they're only as small as they are because they don't use native widgets.

[0]https://github.com/wjakob/nanogui/tree/master/src

[1]https://github.com/ryankurte/micro-gui

### [NanoGUI](https://github.com/wjakob/nanogui)

I have only played with this briefly, but after the initial setup NanoGUI seemed pretty intuitive https://github.com/wjakob/nanogui

There's GTK which is all LGPL (ok to dynamic link to) and things like nanogui which is BSD (just attribution).

Wondering if this was inspired by Wenzel Jakob's nanogui [0] by any chance. (cz that's what I wanted to do, rewrite nanogui in C, so I don't have to rely on a C++ compiler).

[0] https://github.com/wjakob/nanogui