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by giancarlostoro 2540 days ago
I think you've hit the nail on the head, I've thought about this as well. I think it's clear that UI's are a problem yet to be solved, which is why Electron took off. If you've got a website, you've got a GUI with Electron, and a looot of people know how to slap together some JS and HTML.

I would love to see a language agnostic UI stack that can run across platforms, to an extent Electron is "language agnostic" since you write the UI in whatever language you want, you just then compile it to JS (and eventually WebAssembly).
1 comments
vnorilo 2540 days ago
As a thought experiment, how would the stack differ from Qt, which runs just about everywhere and has bindings for a huge range of languages?
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cricalix 2540 days ago
The one thing that always put me off of the Qt, Wx etc libraries is that it felt like you have to be fairly deep in the weeds with layouts. HTML + CSS ( + something like a framework perhaps for JS niceness) feels much easier, because the browser does the heavy work of laying out the elements for you, resizing them etc. Maybe I've just not sat down long enough to poke the UI work, but every time I have sat down it's felt like a huge effort to get a few text boxes and a data table to render and flow, whilst over in web land, it's a few input tags and a set of table tags in a loop, and then a smattering of CSS.
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vnorilo 2540 days ago
https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtquick-layouts-layouts-qml.html

Doesn't look that bad?

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Crinus 2540 days ago
Why not use the UI designer? It was made exactly for this reason.
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giancarlostoro 2540 days ago
Back to my prior point: how can I leverage the awesome tooling outside of C++?

If I can use any language with the awesome Qt tooling I am set. They seem to be working on making Python such a citizen in the official Qt languages stack but its taking forever and is only 1 single language.

Maybe they need to do what Godot did. Implement a bridging programming language that bridges any native language to their engine. With Godot I can write code in Rust, D, probably Nim and so on and all due to GDNative their bridging language to ensure you can use what you are comfortable using.

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Crinus 2540 days ago
Ah yeah i agree there. Honestly the only way for this to be properly addressed is for a toolkit to commit to API and ABI stability (meaning C++ and any other language without a stable ABI is out of the picture), then people can build on top of it with other languages and focus on actually making the entire framework stable instead of rewriting everything every 4-5 years.
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