Yue
webview
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Yue | webview | |
---|---|---|
8 | 68 | |
3,328 | 12,005 | |
2.6% | 1.0% | |
6.8 | 8.5 | |
23 days ago | 4 days ago | |
C++ | C | |
GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 only | 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.
webview
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Why Bloat Is Still Software's Biggest Vulnerability
You can create the webview using each platforms native GUI toolkit and setup JS communication yourself OR you can use a lightweight library that does it for [1] (search its README for language "bindings").
[1] https://github.com/webview/webview
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Ask HN: Do we still need Electron?
Each platform has it's own webview control available as a shared library installed with the OS.
MacOS has WKWebKit based on WebKit.
Windows has WebView2 based on Edge/Chromium.
Linux has webkit2gtk based on WebKit.
Tools like Tauri use a simple cross-platform single-header abstraction called webview.h[1].
Electron no longer allows Node.js to be called from renderer processes, all communication with Node.js is done via IPC.
In this case, why do we still need Electron? Why does it have to be tied to V8/Node.js?
The fact that Chromium Embedded Framework exists and is third-party makes me think that Chromium wasn't designed for being embedded, and Electron is filling that gap.
This is elucidated here further here https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2:
> it's difficult to reuse their work...if another WebKit-based application or another port wanted to do multiprocess based on Chromium WebKit, it would be necessary to reinvent or cut & paste a great deal of code.
It makes me think that perhaps WebKit was the better choice for embedding. The fact that Node used V8 made Chromium the choice, and that Node being called from the renderer was the original way of working. Maybe because WebKit didn't have a build for Windows was an issue too...
But now that we have Bun, perhaps it's time that WebKit becomes that browser target of choice for desktop apps on macOS.
Unless WebView2 for macOS arrives, which would have a more sane cross-platform story. WebView2 has a very large feature-set though which make take a while to implement for macOS.
[1]: https://github.com/webview/webview/blob/master/webview.h
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Nui C++ User Interface Library
Nui could base on this in theory. Nui uses https://github.com/webview/webview under the hood, which provides browser windows for linux, windows or mac. Nui adds some cmake to make the "in-browser" and "main-process" part appear seemless, as well adding a DSEL for the "in-browser" view part.
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[Golang] Recommandation de bibliothèque d'interface utilisateur légère
WebView 7k
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Did you hear about using a web browser as GUI using C99?
You mean something like this?
- Desktop apps with golang
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Neutralinojs – Build lightweight cross-platform desktop apps with JavaScript
Golang can compile to windows statically, and on Windows those bindings are using the MSWebView2 API (aka Microsoft Edge webview).
I know that you can also compile the webview.cc into a dll specifically, and link against that. But I'd never done with Visual C++ because I am cross-compiling from Linux to Windows.
The README of the webview/webview project refers to the WebView2 SDK on NuGet, however [1]
[1] https://github.com/webview/webview#windows-preparation
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The Quest for the Ultimate GUI Framework
The author shrugs off web tech (maybe because of electron bloat?) but you can avoid the bloat by using each platforms native web browser control. There are even cross-platform libraries that make creating the native control and cross-communication simple. These applications would be architecturally similar to Win32 apps using and communicating with a XAML Island, but the advantage of web tech is it's an open standard and WPF/WinUI is not.
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(Hayami.app) A tile-based mini browser. You can pin webpages and files on a screen together. Not for deep reading but for having a quick look at the latest information at any time.
For example, you could use a native webview (Edge WebView2 for Windows and WebKit for MacOS/Linux), which uses much less RAM than Electron.
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Should web developers learn Flutter instead of React Native/Electron for mobile/desktop apps?
From a more established company with more guaranteed long-term support than the web frameworks that solve the above problems (like Tauri and Webview)
What are some alternatives?
Vaca - C++ Win32 wrapper to develop GUI apps
fyne - Cross platform GUI toolkit in Go inspired by Material Design
NanoGUI - Minimalistic GUI library for OpenGL
imgui - Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies
libui - Simple and portable (but not inflexible) GUI library in C that uses the native GUI technologies of each platform it supports.
Lorca - Build cross-platform modern desktop apps in Go + HTML5
sciter - Sciter: the Embeddable HTML/CSS/JS engine for modern UI development
tauri - Build smaller, faster, and more secure desktop applications with a web frontend.
wxWidgets - Cross-Platform C++ GUI Library
wry - Cross-platform WebView library in Rust for Tauri.