[karim]

Well, plenty of people tried this approach (off the top of my head, wxWidgets, Tk (the TCL framework, still powering Python, Perl and Ruby GUIs), FLTK). Unfortunately, all those frameworks fail for the same reason: they're all 90% there but fall short on the small details.

Still, let's hope that libui does great --- it's already quite a feat to have the basic window controls working the same on three different platforms.

[ArkyBeagle]

I've used Tk many, many times as a foundation of a temporary strawman interface while the real UI experts ... do whatever it is they do. I've also used it for custom instrumentation GUIs.

That 90% constitutes a lingua franca.

Not knocking the nice UI/UX folks - they work their corner, I work mine, and it's nice to have a technology to bridge schedules. My observation is that that 10% consumes as much as 1000% of the schedule at times :)

[Arnt]

The first 90% are easy, the next 90% wear you out, and the final 90% are what makes a good product...

In my experience, the story of using a layered UI like this is that for a short while you use it, then customers start asking for features it cannot deliver and you start writing platform-specific code, then after a while the portable code is a minority. At some point there's a meeting in which someone points out that a particular platform is 90% of the value and wouldn't it be better to make do with just that 90%? Are these other platforms really worth the effort?

[ArkyBeagle]

ObDisclosure: I'm in the embedded/middleware space.

I dunno. My peers don't write UI much at all; I do these things as force multipliers for my own nefarious purposes.

None of it gets "published" in a formally supported way, so I don't have any accountability for 'em. They're intentionally ugly but not dissonantly so. The design is "look, but don't touch." I mainly use them to anticipate integration errors and do something useful to aid in diagnosis of those. The theme here is "it ain't me, babe" or "holy cow, thanks for finding that" - determination on that axis.

But I also put adequate instrumentation in to exploit in the first place. Seems to be a lost art.

To me, the perfect user interface is no user interface at all - maybe a "push to start" button - a physical button. Second best is command line/scripting, third is the sort of thing I write.

In the embedded space, you might get a perception that this is cheating. I just smile.

[register]

This is not the same approach. Wxwidget is C++ which makes binding to other languages cumbersome. The same applies also to TK which is binded trough an embedded TCL interpreter.

[sdx23]

Also TK doesn't offer native looks. Wx tries, though I'm not sure how good taking into account all platforms.

[networked]

Since version 8.5 Tk ships with themed widgets that by default try to look native on Windows and OS X by leveraging the respective platforms' native GUI toolkits for drawing.

For the details see https://tcl.wiki/14796.

[creshal]

Wx tries, but IMO fails to varying degrees to feel "right". WxGTK in Linux is okay-ish (everyone expects shitty UX from GTK programs anyway); WxMSW is an eye-sore. I haven't dared using Wx under OSX yet.

[mwcampbell]

What makes wxMSW an eyesore? Is it anymore of an eyesore than plain Win32?

[vram22]

Can you elaborate on your points? including this one:

>WxMSW is an eye-sore