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by zserge 3039 days ago
I agree with you, and I tried my best to change things.

A few years ago I made Anvil - a React-ish framework for Android for native UI (reactive, declarative, works best with Redux) and have been using it in many production apps as long as I was doing Android development. But it still is a niche product, most developers prefer visual UI editor and whatever is the official Google way to do Android apps. Still, I'm very proud of Anvil.

https://github.com/zserge/anvil

Then, once I had to deal with desktop apps I figured out that HTML/CSS/JS seems to be the best option for custom (no native widgets) and modern (animations, shadows, nice fonts etc) UI. But Electron was a heavy beast, so I made a tiny wrapper over native browser engines (webviews). So far I'm very happy with it, it's much lighter and smaller than electron. And it's very convenient to use from C++ or Go. Some kind people added Rust and Nim support, I'm now working on Python and Node.js bindings. So yeah, it's pretty much language-agnostic, although it's still web UI.

I really hope it can take it's niche for small desktop apps that don't need the full power of Electron, yet need to have a good look.

https://github.com/zserge/webview

1 comments

Been enjoying your library webview for some small home projects. Thanks!