It's a shame that for a GUI toolkit, there are no screenshots, either on Github or the official project website. It's very difficult to evaluate this based on descriptions alone.

Holy hell, this thing gets accessibility right.

This is probably the first niche GUI toolkit I've seen on HN that actually does this well. I tried with VO on Mac OS and it just works, no issues to be reported. Most other frameworks of this size have absolutely no accessibility at all. This is why using the platform is a good idea.

This is the most powerful combo together with PEX to distribute Python specific dependency free apps in my testing. (As long as all the widgets you need are supported)

I love this friendly two-way race between beeware and kivy for a new cross-platform python GUI framework. If they ever manage to break the android stranglehold and become first-class citizens on mobile this could be huge. For a wide range of data-sciency apps that would be the royal road.

Is there a WYSIWYG GUI editor for this, a la Visual Basic?

Because honestly, you can have the best GUI toolkit in the world but without a visual editor, building a GUI-rich app will still be incredibly tedious.

It looks pretty nice. I would say that they are falling into the same trap as other native toolkits, in that they are targeting win32/MFC components.

As Windows users are probably going to be your number one utilizers of target applications, it's always weird that that experience is always the worst. Maybe target WPF/WinUI instead, for a more modern experience.

   <div class="search-input">
     <input type="text" />
     <button />
   </div>

  handle WM_DPICHANGED
  recreate fonts with actual_dpi/reference_dpi scale factor and send WM_SETFONT
  and apply scale factor to all DeferWindowPos() operations.

I'm disappointed this uses the "90s" imperative GUI building paradigm, with manual state updates. QML, Slint and most web toolkits in the last 10 years gave this important topic more attention and are much better GUI frameworks for it.

Oh well, maybe someone will write a wrapper for this like relm.

Really wish there was something like this, but C or Rust instead of Python Or JavaScript.

I remember this project, but it is way too ambitious and it hasn't gained much traction yet (it was started almost 10 years ago). Maybe this is the version that will push it forward

I like BeeWare Toga a lot, but I'm having a hard time convincing myself to use it for anything serious. Not because of any problem with the project itself, just because I've realized that it's probably always going to be a niche offering. A few years back I spent a while looking at various GUI toolkit options out there, and ultimately came to the conclusion that cross-platform native UI toolkits are rapidly becoming an anachronism, and I should probably just bite the bullet and learn how to use Electron.

25 years ago, during cross-platform toolkits' heyday, it was a different world. People expected more UI consistency because they spent virtually all their time interacting with native applications. The Web did exist, but it was still mostly just a hypermedia viewer plus a few ecommerce sites. XMLHttpRequest was under development at Microsoft but hadn't made it into any publicly available Web browsers. The initial public releases of GMail and Google Maps, arguably the first widely-used modern Web applications, were still 5+ years away.

Fast forward to now, and everyone's completely accustomed to spending most their time interacting with mobile and Web applications that do heavy custom styling and have very little visual consistency with each other, let alone the host operating system. It turns out that we're mostly fine with it. It's not necessarily that there aren't usability problems; it's just that it turns out that inconsistent control styling is nowhere near as much of a problem as poor layout and flow.

So I think that the "it's good for users" argument for native GUI toolkits has largely fallen by the wayside. They still attract me, though. But for a different reason: Electron & friends have poor developer experience. You have to fuss with at least three languages for UI layout, styling, and control, and quite possibly at least one more if doing everything in JavaScript is not your cup of tea. And, frankly, HTML+CSS is a PITA for layout compared to many native GUI toolkits, and wrapping one's head around modern JavaScript frontend frameworks is a much bigger task grokking APIs like GTK+, Cocoa, and WinForms.

I acknowledge that Electron's easy for Web frontend developers, since it introduces very few new concepts, but for the rest of us I think that there might still be value in a cross-platform GUI toolkit that we can all use from our favorite programming language. But I'm starting to think that what it should really look like is something that's fundamentally similar to an Electron-style "we're just going to give you a canvas you can draw in and some tools for drawing in it" approach, only without all the additional technical cruft and complexity that comes with needing to support - and work through - modern Web standards.

In some ways I like what Flutter's trying to do. But it's tied to a specific programming language that I don't already know and don't feel like learning. And it's treating accessibility as an afterthought on at least some platforms, where I think that nowadays it's a non-negotiable that needs to be baked in from the very beginning.