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by riazrizvi 544 days ago
The developer is rediscovering the concept of a GUI library. The modern variant is the mouse-driven GUI developed by Xerox in the 1970s (and later commercialized by them as Xerox Star) which Jobs famously copied to create Apple’s Lisa, and Gates famously mimicked to create MS Windows. Since they determine the look and feel of a platform and their design determines the ease with which developers can create apps for the platform, GUI frameworks became pivotal to platform wars across all sorts of products, from OSs to browsers, graphics engines and anything else whose success was determined largely by the interface developer experience.
2 comments

I'm a gray beard like you probably but I disagree with this statement.

This library makes use of modern composable components, is declarative driven and not imperative; and doesn't do immediate rendering in all cases.

It can target incredibly different backends, e.g. DOM/canvas/raylib.

All of this in modern C as a `.h` library alone.

These are great features and not just a 'youngster discovers' project.

Maybe a README that shows how it works and what it does would help. As it is it is quite opaque IMO, with just a few high level comments.
The README for the project is one of the most detailed READMEs I’ve ever seen. The landing page for the website has as much detail as you can reasonably expect, even including a couple of feature demos. There are clear links to the docs and the code.

The developer has clearly put a lot of thought into this content. Worth taking a second or two to see what’s available before criticising it.

It's in the repo; landing pages are usually for generating interest.

https://github.com/nicbarker/clay

I swear to god, I thought this is AI generated response.
I’m still not sure it isn’t