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Show HN: Slint – A declarative UI toolkit for embedded and desktop

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Re: Show HN: Slint – A declarative UI toolkit for embedded and desktop

#121

Post by madnirua »

kolektiv wrote: post #40
ogoffart wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to clarify: are you talking about the image next to Desktop in https://slint.dev/use-cases#desktop-applications ? Indeed, we'll improve on that. Thanks for your feedback! For the story, we initially had screenshot of an actual commercial desktop app, but we were asked to remove it by the author until the app is actually released. So we went with that set of of widget instead, which is a prototype of the Cosmic s…

I am not a designer (not for 20 years now) but that desktop image (rotating gif of different styles) is not a good advert. There are many, many layout issues with those that I would really spend time to try and make "default" look right out of the box (and in line with platform HID guidelines). I am a Rust developer, and I think Slint could be amazing, but those things will put off people who are driven by design qua…

Thanks for the feedback. We will try to get some designers to improve the widget gallery examples.

Re: Show HN: Slint – A declarative UI toolkit for embedded and desktop

#122

Post by madnirua »

tensor wrote: post #70
Kelteseth wrote: post #4

Nice to see that Qt finally gets some competition! The pricing alone is a no-brainer. Now the only thing I'm missing from the demos is smooth scrolling :)

I can't find it now, but I remember looking at slint a few months back and finding out that native widget support on the desktop required QT. Is this not true?

Qt is only needed if you want native looking widgets. Otherwise, another style will be used for widget, which does not look native. In the future, we plan to have native backend using the native API, which will allow native widgets without using Qt.

Reference: https://github.com/slint-ui/slint/blob/master/docs/install_q...

Re: Show HN: Slint – A declarative UI toolkit for embedded and desktop

#123

Post by ilyt »

peelz wrote: post #69
ilyt wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish that there was some GUI lib dedicated to small embedded systems, I just want to draw some buttons and sliders without eating hundreds of flash/ram...

Have you looked into fltk-rs?

looking at required dependencies it couldn't even run on the microcontroller

Re: Show HN: Slint – A declarative UI toolkit for embedded and desktop

#124

Post by [deleted] »

zoogeny wrote: post #50

There is often a criticism of Javascript, that new frameworks seem to appear every week. But it honestly feels like every week on HN there is a new Rust UI project showing up. Whether it is some new HTML/web thing, a native app thing, a TUI thing, etc. Don't get me wrong, I think that is the sign of a very healthy ecosystem. I am just curious how the Rust evangelists will spin this. Somehow this constant churn on the…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Slint – A declarative UI toolkit for embedded and desktop

#125

Post by ilyt »

varjag wrote: post #111
ilyt wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish that there was some GUI lib dedicated to small embedded systems, I just want to draw some buttons and sliders without eating hundreds of flash/ram...

Some popular embedded display controllers have commands to draw primitives.

I'm essentially looking for something like imgui but with ability to draw directly to framebuffer. I looked at egui but that has same issue.

Re: Show HN: Slint – A declarative UI toolkit for embedded and desktop

#126

Post by madnirua »

joezydeco wrote: post #116
madnirua wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks :) Since Qt is a much broader toolkit, we are considering of writing dedicated blogs to do an objective comparison between the two toolkits on the GUI part only.

Please do! And, speaking as a Qt programmer, address the biggest pain points that Qt user have. Number one: get a virtual keyboard that supports the biggest world languages without a commercial license. That would make me an instant convert.

Thanks :)

For the short term, we have an example that some of our community users and commercial customers a using to build their custom virtual keyboard

https://github.com/slint-ui/slint/blob/master/examples/virtu...

Re: Show HN: Slint – A declarative UI toolkit for embedded and desktop

#127

Post by joezydeco »

madnirua wrote: post #126
joezydeco wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please do! And, speaking as a Qt programmer, address the biggest pain points that Qt user have. Number one: get a virtual keyboard that supports the biggest world languages without a commercial license. That would make me an instant convert.

Thanks :) For the short term, we have an example that some of our community users and commercial customers a using to build their custom virtual keyboard https://github.com/slint-ui/slint/blob/master/examples/virtu...

I'll try it out, thanks.

I'm pretty fed up with Qt and I'm getting kind of excited to start experimenting with this.

Re: Show HN: Slint – A declarative UI toolkit for embedded and desktop

#129

Post by WorldMaker »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #128

What's the catch? There's always a catch, like "turns out it's just WebView" or "turns out only the android and Linux CDE implementations actually exists" or "call us for pricing"

Looks like "Call us for pricing":

> Free for non-commercial use.

> For commercial use, the runtime fee is based on volume and type of embedded system.

Re: Show HN: Slint – A declarative UI toolkit for embedded and desktop

#130

Post by CyberDildonics »

ogoffart wrote: post #114
CyberDildonics wrote: post #100

Ignoring for a second that "Slint" is only slightly better than "60fps" as a name for a GUI library, I think using a custom domain specific language for configuration is a giant mistake. It really is not difficult to just call functions to set values. Laying out GUI components is also rarely what takes time when doing GUI programming. A brand new custom domain specific language has almost no benefits but has huge dow…

DSLs are not inherently more difficult to learn than API and conventions of a complex GUI library. DSL offer benefits in terms of expressiveness and conciseness. The focus in UI programming is on rapid iteration and immediate results, which can be facilitated by a live preview in the IDE made possible by a declarative DSL

DSLs are not inherently more difficult to learn than API and conventions of a complex GUI library

In theory maybe, in practice the indirection and extra layer of syntax, error handling, documentation and edge cases mean this is not true. Also this is an assertion without any evidence.

DSL offer benefits in terms of expressiveness and conciseness.

Prove it.

The focus in UI programming is on rapid iteration and immediate results

I have never thought that setting up values through functions was not rapid. It has never been a bottleneck or time sink when making a GUI. Unfortunately, using custom markup languages that don't work like they say they should has been a time sink.

which can be facilitated by a live preview in the IDE made possible by a declarative DSL

My experience is that this is very minor in terms of overall utility and doesn't actually require a custom markup language.

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