Our great sponsors
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
-
slint
Slint is a declarative GUI toolkit to build native user interfaces for Rust, C++, or JavaScript apps.
Rebol [ http://www.rebol.com ] were still king.
It was simple to use, small executables, expressive, but no longer maintained :(
I feel that we would've had better tooling for writing performant GUI apps today if electron JS never took off.
It certainly has its place, and I laud the authors for their efforts, but seeing how every startup is using electron for their native applications, I have little hope for lean software.
At the end of the day, developers need to finance their projects. No other toolchain out there [1] is going to give you the flexibility, development speed, and freedom to develop beautiful looking desktop apps using the muscle memory you trained while writing webpages. Of course, you can write the same application in Qt, GLFW, whatever, but I don't think anyone will disagree that it's much slower to build and prototype responsive UIs with these tools.
[1] Wry and Tauri (https://tauri.app/) might be noteworthy, but I don't know how much of a difference they make, as the runtime is still JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
Their Desktop app is written in Qt C++[1].
[1] https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop
With Slint (https://slint.dev) we're trying to make a lightweight toolkit that doesn't use HTML/CSS. And that you can program either from low level languages such as C++ or Rust. As well as with higher level language such as JavaScript, and we want to extend to python too.