Viewing profile — zackbrown

On the other hand, video games enable a wide breadth of intellectual experiences. Being a simulated guitar hero and simulated pro skater is more enriching than the likely baseline …

Thank you for the follow up and suggestions! We did post on r/rust with solid reception[0] and I've added r/webdev to our channels list for the next push. Will also capture a GIF, …

That's great to hear! C# was my first love as a programming language, but it's been some years. We would love to support it with Pax.

Yes, supporting additional languages is straightforward; just need to write language-specific SDKs with bindings to the necessary Pax APIs, which are exposed through an ABI / FFI. …

Thanks for this report! It seems one of the demo videos on the mobile site was too large; we have deployed a fix. Highly recommend trying out the site on desktop, where you will ge…

Hey HN! We are Zack, Warfa, and Sam. After some human-years of building Pax, we're excited finally to enter Beta and to invite anyone to build with Pax for the first time. What is …

Pax's primary goal is "designability" — to enable a vector design tool to read & write the same content & behavior you may write by hand. (.pax files) Our solution requires languag…

Agreed! Markup-as-content-backbone is one of many things HTML/CSS do extremely well, and I agree not building around something like this was a major weakness of Flash. Silverlight …

> just tools that build HTML/CSS for you 1. not Figma or Flash: it's not practical or performant to manipulate HTML/CSS to achieve the creative freedom of a vector design tool[0] 2…

Thank you for the tip!

Primary goal of Pax is "designability" -- any project can be opened and edited visually at any time with Pax Designer, which is a vector design tool. The difference between Webflow…

I won't claim Pax is better than any of these, but that we seek to solve different goals. Unlike Flash: driven by a markup language, fully open source, no plugin required, solves a…

Both Figma autolayout and HStack / VStack are careful subsets of flexbox; not quite the same thing. Consider whether a marble statue is "just a subset" of the block that contained …

> Alternate layout engines for the web might be a fun experiment, PhD thesis, or talent retention program, but it's not practical. Flexbox was once an "alternate layout engine for …

> Care to point us to a better combination than HTML/CSS when it comes to layouting flexible interfaces? HTML/CSS is pretty good! SwiftUI's HStack and VStack are solid, though they…

> HTML and CSS is pretty good considering the problems is solves. Agreed: pretty good. Shouldn't we pursue excellence?

Closer to "yet another Flash," but 100% open source, and no browser plugin thanks to WebAssembly

Point taken! And yes, especially for developers (our core target demographic,) you are right that hand-writing should account for >5% of code volume. Syntax is fairly contentious. …

I don't think the world should abandon HTML, nor break backwards compatibility across the HTML spec. The first cars drove on roads designed for horses, and horses are still around.…

We chose an XML-like syntax because it's clear & explicit & established (HTML) — you can know where you are in a hierarchy clearly at any point thanks to closing tags. The major do…

It sounds like we agree about the good parts of HTML. > There has never been a better markup language. > It has been the best thing for accessibility we ever came up with. I observ…

> I hope in the process of doing it we will find new ways of doing things. HTML & CSS themselves have become a major bottleneck to quality and creativity. The arcane layout model, …

A cross-platform UI kit that's also a vector design tool: https://www.pax.dev/ Sort of like a new Flash, but open source, compiles to WASM or LLVM instead of requiring a plugin, an…

This is really cool. I've been building a GUI system in Rust that features an expression language[0] — and we ruled out using CEL a while ago because the canonical Go CEL interpret…

Not a perfect comparison, but probably closer to mycotoxin exposure than smoking.