I made applications with Nuklear that runs on Android, iOS, macOS, Windows and share the same main C code. For me, it's a dream come true if you create a cross-platform application that needs a simple GUI.
Dear ImGui is also fantastic and more complete than Nuklear.
What I like a lot with Nukear and Dear Imgui is that you have a GUI that is GPU accelerated and so can be updated at 60 FPS without burning resources.
You are right accessibility is not supported by those 2 frameworks and that's an issue.
One of the applications I wrote simulate a LED protocol and so you just need to launch it and then use it over the network from a server.
These are meant for use in games that already do this. They are not suitable for building regular apps.
How do you even compile C code for Android / PlayStore?
Debugging is working smoothly, I was surprised how good the experience was.
My setup is that Window run in a VM (Parallels) from macOS.
I can then open the iOS code from XCode and the Android from Visual studio and switch very quickly between the targets.
In that way, I always commit versions that I already tested and debugged on all the targets I need to support.
Android NDK
The Android NDK is a toolset that lets you implement parts of your app in native code, using languages such as C and C++. For certain types of apps, this can help you reuse code libraries written in those languages.
I've found nativefiledialog to be quite good for that use case
Let's not forget just how low the bar has been set by Electron. Microsoft Teams manages to use 600MB of RAM.
Some reported that moving from Qt to Dear Imgui resulted in a codebase three-time smaller.
I wouldn't say never use an minimalist framework. It can be handy for embedded debugging tools or for toy projects. But I wouldn't use one of these things for an application that I thought might have a few thousand users and some sort of life span.
I'm expecting a GraalVM rejoinder from someone. For anyone who's used GraalVM (particularly with Clojure) - what are the downsides and limitations?
If the author's app takes 10 seconds to boot, I am afraid they need to blame either Clojure or their own code for that.
Granted, this usually only comes from those that don't bother much to learn about the underlying platform and are sometimes even agressive against what actually made their favourite guest language possible to exist.
Must look into GraalVM at some point, but, as someone new to Clojure, I'm wary of spending too much time on tooling yet. I've found in the past I can tinker so much with such things that it interferes with getting fluent with more fundamental stuff.
I'd be interested to see if either now or in the future Clojure + JavaFX in GraalVM would be feasible.
Edit: I don't quite get the install size issue - I thought native image was an entirely standalone executable?
Ironically they have to thank Oracle for doing something that Sun was religiously against, having an AOT compiler as part of the free beer Java layer.
If you are making something serious, you will have to implement at least the GUI layer separately for all platforms.
Qt? Tk? I've used both cross-platform and both work great for desktop operating systems (and unlike in the olden days, Tk's themed widgets actually look reasonably native now). Qt's only downside is the licensing and the sheer size of it, and Tk's only downside (for my use cases) is the lack of an embeddable browser widget; in both cases these are issues regardless of platform.
The actual cross-platform issues, from what I've seen, are more to do with the non-GUI pieces. For example, Windows and macOS/Linux printing are wildly different from one another, and all three operating systems have wildly different strategies for packaging and distributing applications (especially when writing the program in a scripting language like Python or Ruby or what have you instead of something precompiled like C++ or Rust; with Linux this is trivial, and with macOS this is less trivial but manageable, but with Windows this is a royal pain in the ass).
On another note, I'm currently looking into Avalonia and .NET Core as another potential option in this space; from preliminary testing, .NET Core looks like it mostly addresses the issues I've encountered (it certainly makes it easy to cross-compile for Windows/Mac/Linux, and I'm hoping it'll eventually subsume Xamarin or portions thereof to enable easy Android and iOS builds, too), so whether or not this becomes my go-to hinges on whether or not Avalonia itself is ready for primetime (and while simple examples seem to be promising, as are more complex examples like the Avalonia version of ILSpy, I'm still actively investigating).
Fltk will let you do it in 700KB with no dependencies. (100KB if you're crafty). Juce, Qt, pyQt, opengl+imgui, opengl+nanogui all work well. There is also gtk, Tk, wxWindows ...
Where are you getting this idea from?
Using something like luastatic[1], with whatever Lua libraries you want (including IUP), you can get something pretty similar to this system, except of course you'd be using Lua instead of Janet. Janet is really interesting and that alone justifies this framework very well.
However, even in the python sample, I couldn't find anything that was just "Download, Unzip, Modify" to start creating (all seem to have cumbersome install steps or hoops to jump through - I basically wanted something that was 0 configuration/installation, for fast iteration and development).
It's not so active these days, admittedly.
I think "cross-platform" should include mobile.
The new crop of immediate mode cross platform GUI libraries are more interesting (such as nuklear and Dear Imgui). I also did some experimentation with these libs a few days ago: https://liuliu.me/eyes/write-cross-platform-gui-in-swift-lik...
They're also completely inaccessible to blind people (using screen readers) and probably some people with other disabilities as well. IUP is at least partially based on platform controls. I'll take usable over interesting.
There should/could be open accessibility APIs in each OS which sit between (e.g.) screenreader software and custom UI frameworks.
In the end, this feels like a an appraisal of IUP and Janet more than a demo of anything new. If that's the case, then familiarity with your stack is more important for this kind of productivity than anything else, so trying something new is less appealing to me.
But I was curious about Janet, so seeing some examples was nice.
But you are spot-on that this is more showcasing the joining of various other things out there, rather than anything innovative (although I do plan to add more and extend the existing convenience wrappers, such as wrapping the IUP calls in a hiccup-like DSL using Janet macros).
To simplify a little, you pass these libraries the events from the windowing system and it gives you a list of triangles back. Then you feed the triangles to the GPU and you're done. All the logic (and nothing but the logic) is done by the GUI library.
This is why dear imgui is perhaps the most popular GUI library in the world. It's used in a lot of game development tools, etc.
If anyone is interested in the topic, I am writing a lightweight flexbox-based retained mode GUI layout rendering library that integrates like imgui/nuklear. Give me a shout if you want to know more.
ldd app.bin|rg -o '/usr/lib[^ ]+'|xargs stat -L -c %s|perl -lne'$s += $_; END {print $s}'
38120904
[1] https://gist.github.com/9214/dfa15d37342065dbf368eae35abcdc3...
> Puppy is an app
OK, you run 'Puppy'. It doesn't do anything.
> RandomHost is 'https://dog.ceo/api/breeds/image/random'
OK, 'RandomHost' is a constant, looks like a URL
> Get an image from RandomHost
OK, I think you meant Set Message to Read RandomHost retreiving UUENCODE.
> No. Get an image using json
Not the previous thing. I think you meant Set Message to Read RandomHost retrieving JSON, field Message.
> Get Image at Message
OK. I think you meant Read the URL Message and retrieve an image file
> Show the Image
OK. Displaying the Image on the screen
> Add Repeat Button
OK. Displaying a button named 'Repeat'
> App is While on Repeat, do the Display.
OK. App is set. Do display, Wait for Repeat button, Loop
> Puppy?
Puppy is an application:
Repeat
RandomHost = 'https://dog.ceo/api/breeds/image/random'
Message = fetch(RandomHost, JSON)."message"
anImage = fetch(Message, DATA).ensure(IMAGE_TYPE)
Display.reset(Items [
Image: An Image,
Button: Repeat text "Repeat"
])
ClientSideWait Repeat.onPress
Forever
Your app can run.
You have eight error conditions to discuss. Use 'Talk about errors' to decide how to handle them. Right now, the answer is 'ignore first, or just explode'.
>Push
Pushing transcript to GitLab.... Building App.... Pushing Build to GitLab.
> Move button above image.