Why would anyone choose XML for a modern GUI layout in 2026? That seems like a mis-step.
The entire Internet uses almost XML for UI. It's fine. Certainly not great, but not terrible either.
Show HN: A Modern GUI Library for Ada: CSS Styling, XML UI, SDL3
21–28 of 28 posts
Re: Show HN: A Modern GUI Library for Ada: CSS Styling, XML UI, SDL3
#22Why would anyone choose XML for a modern GUI layout in 2026? That seems like a mis-step.
XML is great.
Re: Show HN: A Modern GUI Library for Ada: CSS Styling, XML UI, SDL3
#23Rust version of this (as close as possible) would be very cool.
Re: Show HN: A Modern GUI Library for Ada: CSS Styling, XML UI, SDL3
#24What do you think would make someone choose Adi2 over Qt or Flutter?
Re: Show HN: A Modern GUI Library for Ada: CSS Styling, XML UI, SDL3
#25What do you think would make someone choose Adi2 over Qt or Flutter?
I think depends on the use case, CSS styling, Ada, static self contained executable, portability, simplicity. I'm curious what people think about this, I'm happy with it and use it for my own projects so I thought it would be useful to others. Honestly Adi2 still needs a lot of work to be compared to those big 2 but it is already useful.
Re: Show HN: A Modern GUI Library for Ada: CSS Styling, XML UI, SDL3
#26What do you think would make someone choose Adi2 over Qt or Flutter?
I think depends on the use case, CSS styling, Ada, static self contained executable, portability, simplicity. I'm curious what people think about this, I'm happy with it and use it for my own projects so I thought it would be useful to others. Honestly Adi2 still needs a lot of work to be compared to those big 2 but it is already useful.
Anyway, it’s cool that you’re already using it. Good luck with the rest of the project.
Re: Show HN: A Modern GUI Library for Ada: CSS Styling, XML UI, SDL3
#27I'm not very good at programming. I tried to run this on Windows 11 and ran into some issues but managed to get most of the examples mostly working after a while. They were all missing text but most of the pictures and css would render. I used msys2 (and spammed Gemini with error messages) for building manually but had to modify a number of the build files after making sure I had all the SDL3 bits installed.
I'm assuming I did something wrong on my end, but commenting here to let you know I did have problems building and running this on Windows. I am interested in learning the Ada language and wanted to use it to make very simple desktop apps for Windows. The GUI options for Windows were always kind of rough.
Re: Show HN: A Modern GUI Library for Ada: CSS Styling, XML UI, SDL3
#28Looks great! I was particularly impressed by the following: >"A built-in lightweight HTML view widget renders documentation-style markup with cascading styles." Basically you built a miniature, integrated, embedded, open-source web browser which can parse CSS and render to SDL... very impressive!: https://github.com/ovenpasta/adi2/blob/master/src/adi-widget... https://github.com/ovenpasta/adi2/blob/master/src/adi-wid…
The absence of {$IFDEF} is one of the best features of Ada (from a long time Pascal (and its multitude of dialects) programmer.