Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Libui: GUI library in C

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–186 of 186 posts

Re: Libui: GUI library in C

#181

Post by mwcampbell »

radarsat1 wrote: post #137
icebraining wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a new approach, though. SWT (for the JVM) and wxWidgets (C++, with bindings for more than a dozen languages) have been following it for years.

Actually SWT was one of the most pleasant experiences I've had coding GUI stuff. I always found it such a shame that it's only possible to use within the Java ecosystem. I really wanted an interface to the SWT binary libraries from other languages, I looked into it but it seemed intractable to port. If this library takes a similar approach it's probably doing something right.

SWT itself is written in Java. The native libraries are super-thin JNI wrappers for the underlying OS APIs.

I did a project last year where I wanted to use SWT, but I wanted to write the program in Python, and use CPython rather than Jython so I could have access to C extension modules like lxml. So I hacked up a solution using the Avian lightweight JVM and the pyjnius JNI-based Python/JVM bridge from the Kivy project. I should release that sometime.

Re: Libui: GUI library in C

#182

Post by mwcampbell »

creshal wrote: post #70
sdx23 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also TK doesn't offer native looks. Wx tries, though I'm not sure how good taking into account all platforms.

Wx tries, but IMO fails to varying degrees to feel "right". WxGTK in Linux is okay-ish (everyone expects shitty UX from GTK programs anyway); WxMSW is an eye-sore. I haven't dared using Wx under OSX yet.

What makes wxMSW an eyesore? Is it anymore of an eyesore than plain Win32?

Re: Libui: GUI library in C

#183

Post by mwcampbell »

zuck9 wrote: post #55
_pmf_ wrote: post #37

> that uses the native GUI technologies of each platform it supports. WPF is native on Windows, Win32/WinForms is also native on Windows. I'm assuming it uses Win32, although a third party FFI to WPF would be very, very nice.

Windows also has DirectUI, very alike WPF which it uses internally (and also has some 3rd-party OSS implementations). WinForms/Win32 is the first UI platform that Windows supported. It's getting less used because of the new UI platforms. I don't really understand how do they define WPF, UWP, XAML and DirectUI now or how do they compare. XAML was the language used behind WPF but it seems they have changed the terms. T…

You mentioned third-party OSS implementations of DirectUI. Can you provide links?

Re: Libui: GUI library in C

#185

Post by damptowel »

hoodoof wrote: post #16

I was recently thinking that operating systems should ditch their custom desktops in favor of a browser based UI. Microsoft tried this idea out and it didn't work a few years back but it still seems to me that a browser based OS UI would be far more effective than things like Gnome and KDE and all that stuff. Edit: well I guess Google had the same idea long ago and called it ChromeOS - browser as OS interface.

The web is hacky and getting anything to look and feel just right is a pita more often than not. So people use band aids like bootstrap, sass, react, angular, jade, custom build systems requiring lots of set up... frankly speaking I'm baffled people put up with piling up layers and layers of abstraction and somehow consider it easier and, god forbid, the future of the desktop. Seems like a great example of 'easy vs simple'.

Re: Libui: GUI library in C

#186

Post by zuck9 »

mwcampbell wrote: post #183
zuck9 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows also has DirectUI, very alike WPF which it uses internally (and also has some 3rd-party OSS implementations). WinForms/Win32 is the first UI platform that Windows supported. It's getting less used because of the new UI platforms. I don't really understand how do they define WPF, UWP, XAML and DirectUI now or how do they compare. XAML was the language used behind WPF but it seems they have changed the terms. T…

You mentioned third-party OSS implementations of DirectUI. Can you provide links?

https://github.com/duilib/duilib
Post reply on HN