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by modeless 2003 days ago
I think the right way to add GUI support to this is to use the web. Simply embed an HTTP server in your binary and open the user's default web browser on launch. I have a framework for this here: https://github.com/jdarpinian/web-ui-skeleton
1 comments
jart 2002 days ago
Author here. I agree. Check out redbean which is a single-file distributable web server, built with cosmopolitan: https://justine.lol/redbean/index.html redbean is forking web server (works great on windows) that can serve 1 million+ gzip encoded responses per second (only linux and freebsd are capable of that kind of performance) because APE binaries are isomorphic to the zip format which enables kernelspace copies. You just bundle all your assets inside the .com executable by changing the extension to .zip and the web server will deliver them via http.
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modeless 2002 days ago
Yeah, very similar idea. The zip trick is awesome; especially letting the browser do the decompression is brilliant. My version has a couple features you might want: automatically opening the browser when launched and shutting down the server when the last tab is closed, and a debug mode where it serves directly from the filesystem to make editing easier. Man, I can think of so many cool features I'd want to add to this as well:

CGI support. Maybe also an option to embed node or deno, or even tcc for directly executing C source as CGI scripts.

Embedded writable SQLite DBs. Appending would clearly be tricky but probably doable.

PWA support, giving you native notifications, launcher icons, and top-level windows sans browser chrome just like a native GUI app.

Option to morph into various app formats (apk, appx, ipa) and instant install on a connected phone or upload to app stores. (Wait, actually all of these formats are based on zip! So maybe this wouldn't even need that much morphing? Just some extra cruft in the zip file, some code signing BS, and maybe an embedded copy of adb.)

With all these features it might not be tiny anymore but it could make a pretty complete cross platform native app dev environment contained in a single file. Still way smaller than Electron.

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