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What is your opinion on the relationship of the GUI toolkit with the operating system?
by turbinerneiter 6y ago
What is your opinion on the relationship of the GUI toolkit with the operating system?
- raphlinus 6y agoThat's a pretty broad question, but overall I favor deeper integration with operating system and platform capabilities. Some people see GUI as something to be built over an abstraction layer consisting of delivery of mouse and keyboard events, plus a fast pipeline to render pixels. I think that misses some opportunities. This is one reason I'm really enjoying Rust. When it comes time to do some platform integration, you just haul out the unsafe keyword and write it, nothing in your way. By contrast, when I was working on Android and had to do a lot of JNI, it was painful.
- ncmncm 6y agoCan't answer for Raph, but deeper integration with the OS interferes with portability. You need enough integration for things to work at all, but after that, integration is in competition with portable features for developers' attention. Attention is always the scarcest resource, all up and down the stack.