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Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

wesleyhill.co.uk

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Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#32

Post by mtkd »

HelloNurse wrote: post #27
mtkd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect something equivalent or better to come out of what is happening with WASM in next year or so. So many people are talking about missing the power of VB, early Delphi, Turbo Pascal etc. and WASM is first tech for a while that looks like it could take that power to the browser.

Sure, there's going to be a bloom of compilers of anything to WASM, but what's discussed here is the opposite technology: lean native applications.

The reason these post-2005 cross-platform envs have gained no traction is because so many devs won't move away from browser - or even consider alts to a browser exist. Suggesting something not SAAS, PAAS etc. right now in most enterprises won't do much for your career.

WASM kind of fixes that - it takes that 90s/00s native speed into the frontend of the moment and makes complex UIs more viable. Any dev with more than 20 years experience shakes their head that it takes WASM to make that happen - but I'm just grateful it is.

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#33

Post by 9214 »

kome wrote: post #15

Red is awesome. Why it's not hip it's a mystery to me...

There isn't much reason to give unfinished language (0.6.3 version as of now) lots of exposure, since lack of useful features / libs / docs / etc might be a potential turn off. Usually everyone starts to jump on a hype train prior to 1.0 release.

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#34

Post by solarkraft »

ivanceras wrote: post #25
jdonaldson wrote: post #14

HaxeUI is another cross platform option: http://haxeui.org

How is the development experience with haxe-ui? Is it trully write once then deploy to all without any need for tweaking quirks on each of the target specifics?

It really looks like it by the website, but I haven't seen anyone use it in the wild. I'm interested as well.

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#35

Post by solarkraft »

jcelerier wrote: post #13
KnstrOnline wrote: post #3

I really miss an awesome cross-platform GUI. Electron is awesome, but bloated.

Qt with QtQuick is awesome, and not bloated :D (as in, it's good enough to work at very decent framerates on embedded systems) Here's a simple example: https://github.com/jcelerier/TodoMVC-QML Notice how the whole thing is a bit less than 150 lines, whereas for instance a Vue.js (the web framework the closest to QML in concept I'd say, though JSX is also not far) implementation is around 200 lines with HTML / CSS / J…

Qt quick is cool, but I never got it running quite perfectly. The examples struggle with the installed libraries, the android support needs a ton of work to set up, they copy the bad parts of javascript ... I like it, but it really frustrates me. There's also little blog-style content about it, which is by far my favorite way to learn.

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#36

Post by Momquist »

MR4D wrote: post #2

I always wondered why there has been no real successor to VB. This looks promising!

Check Gambas if you're interested in a similar language/IDE concept. It's Linux only, but I thought it was pretty cool for quickly prototyping GUI applications, although I do prefer the more mature FreePascal/Lazarus combo.

http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#38

Post by solarkraft »

sigzero wrote: post #22
girishso wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. But Electrcn seems to be the only option these days.

Electron is pushed by JS devs because now they can target another platform with their toolset. The JS crowd is rather large. Sadly, Electron style apps aren't going to go away any time soon.

I hate electron apps ("Simple and light-weight SQL client" is 200MB [or more, because it filled my drive]), but understand why they are used. Creating a good UI is just so easy for JS devs. There are tons of libraries and the web compatibility is an extremely powerful point. I'm really still looking for a solution that is fairly light weight, ease-of-development focused (-> encouraging good code, many don't seem to be) and supports the web as a target.

Kivy is looking to have good principles, but the standard UI kit is quite awful. Supports popular targets except for the web. Qt quick (controls) enables both a good desktop feel and an aright one on mobile platforms. Doesn't support the web (but PureQML is an effort to port the language).

Haxe looks promising but public adoption, for some reason, seems very slim. Adobe Air and things like that promise similar things, but example apps are complete garbage.

React Native works quite well on mobile. There could probably be a similar effort on the desktop, it's surely possible to do something - but then again I'm not a huge fan of javascript either.

I have started doing projects in a browser myself because it is so easy to get started and share what you made, so I can understand that people would want to just use the work they did and bundle it up for shipping. It just looks like something could be done for Electron to lose some weight, at least. Why does it require a Nodejs environment and a browser for every app? Why not adopt the browser model of feeding apps into one renderer for display? Things like that. Maybe they'll wake up some day.

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