Ask HN: How to make a native GUI with a modern language?

• tauri

  469 77,154 9.8 Rust

  Build smaller, faster, and more secure desktop applications with a web frontend.

  

Strange nobody mentioned Tauri, it is really pleasant experience to use and good solution. It works really well for what it does, it is still not covering all features and everything, but it is more performant and more secure alternative to Electron.

I was considering using it for some app that otherwise would be PWA. While I didn't use in-depth features and didn't run into any serious problems, it is likely that not everything will be perfect, but it is also likely that overall experience will be more pleasant.

https://tauri.app/

Check it out.

• Flutter

  1,203 161,805 10.0 Dart

  Flutter makes it easy and fast to build beautiful apps for mobile and beyond

  

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  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.

  

• capy

  7 1,328 8.6 Zig

  💻Build one codebase and get native UI on Windows, Linux and Web

  

• Avalonia.FuncUI

  20 845 8.4 F#

  Develop cross-plattform GUI Applications using F# and Avalonia!

  

You might want to check out Avalonia.FuncUI, which lets you use F# and the cross-platform Avalonia framework to build desktop applications with an Elm-like architecture: https://github.com/fsprojects/Avalonia.FuncUI#example-using-...

• RocketBuilder.jl

  1 6 0.0 Julia

  Gtk based GUI for building rockets for simulating rocket launches.

I write native GUIs in GTK using Julia at the moment. Julia is one of the most modern languages you can use today. Multiple-dispatch, very functional, modern package management and virtual environments, high performance, modern sophisticated REPL environment. GTK is quite nice as Glade is one of the nicer GUI designers.

Here is a simple Julia GTK project on GitHub: https://github.com/ordovician/RocketBuilder.jl

Some articles I wrote related to GTK programming with Julia and GTK in general:

- Understanding GTK Layouts: https://itnext.io/understanding-gtk-layouts-13e5a36256fa

- Hiccups Writing GTK3 GUI Code in Julia: https://towardsdev.com/hiccups-writing-gtk3-gui-code-in-juli...

If Julia is not your cup of tea then GTK can be used with Go and Swift as well.

• goview

  1 1 0.0 TypeScript

I suggest to take a look at tauri[1], lorca[2](requires chrome to be installed) or webview[3](uses system webkit). If you're interested I made a small poc that can be shipped as a single binary file with webview and react - https://github.com/snehesht/goview

1. https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri

• Lorca

  10 7,939 4.2 Go

  Build cross-platform modern desktop apps in Go + HTML5

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• webview

  68 12,005 8.5 C

  Tiny cross-platform webview library for C/C++. Uses WebKit (GTK/Cocoa) and Edge WebView2 (Windows).

  

• v-mode

  89 57 0.0 Emacs Lisp

  🌻 An Emacs major mode for the V programming language.

• fyne

  150 23,218 9.6 Go

  Cross platform GUI toolkit in Go inspired by Material Design

  

I hope golang is modern language for Nerds, welcome to use fune:

https://github.com/fyne-io/fyne

I done research and have found golang fune is able to run even on thin devices. It core depend on open gl and can be changed to run with messa for embeeded device displays. https://pirogove.blogspot.com/

• sciter-js-sdk

  12 - -

Give Sciter a try, It's not OpenSource, but it's app are native looking written in js and html.

https://gitlab.com/sciter-engine/sciter-js-sdk

Suggest a related project