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Honestly, this is a guy who uses GDI, so most of the above options will feel bloated already when looking at the source tarball sizes. That said, has there bee

Honestly, this is a guy who uses GDI, so most of the above options will feel bloated already when looking at the source tarball sizes. That said, has there been any fundamentally groundbreaking crossplatform classic UI toolkits released since the 90s? (IMGui is the only one that has seemed interesting but that's specialized and not a general one really)

rizky05 3y ago
There are plethora of cross-platform UI toolkit, each have their own philosophy. IMO, current popular toolkit have declarative aspect in it. Believe or not the most mature UI toolkit is the one built for chromium. It just works everywhere. EDIT: Another commenter suggest only office as example. IIRC, they are building it using chromium as front-end and .NET as backend.
- whizzter 3y ago
  I think that's the sticking point, declarative toolkits didn't mesh too well with C++(or C) projects so we have a bunch in Rust but that's not too interesting for those with existing codebases, I started on a C++ 20 prototype myself a few years back (because to make it even remotely elegant I felt that I wanted designated initializers from C++20) but it kinda turned into a huge hairball of templates to even approach something like react style jsx/tsx rendering. I'm pretty sure that something based on IMGui could be more or less isomorphous to React style rendering, it'd be up to someone to implement it though (and it'd probably be worth it since building applications at scale you win back a lot of time by not fiddling with state manually all over the place). Using Chromium however is explicitly not where we should want to go (it's basically a kitchen sink in itself), but we go there anyhow (me included often) because it's just so much more quick thanks to progress in dev experience in the webdev area.
- slikrick 3y ago
  if by plethora you mean different web implementations, sure. but there has basically been less than a handful cross platform UI toolkits since GTK/QT

rizky05 3y ago

There are plethora of cross-platform UI toolkit, each have their own philosophy. IMO, current popular toolkit have declarative aspect in it. Believe or not the most mature UI toolkit is the one built for chromium. It just works everywhere. EDIT: Another commenter suggest only office as example. IIRC, they are building it using chromium as front-end and .NET as backend.

whizzter 3y ago
I think that's the sticking point, declarative toolkits didn't mesh too well with C++(or C) projects so we have a bunch in Rust but that's not too interesting for those with existing codebases, I started on a C++ 20 prototype myself a few years back (because to make it even remotely elegant I felt that I wanted designated initializers from C++20) but it kinda turned into a huge hairball of templates to even approach something like react style jsx/tsx rendering. I'm pretty sure that something based on IMGui could be more or less isomorphous to React style rendering, it'd be up to someone to implement it though (and it'd probably be worth it since building applications at scale you win back a lot of time by not fiddling with state manually all over the place). Using Chromium however is explicitly not where we should want to go (it's basically a kitchen sink in itself), but we go there anyhow (me included often) because it's just so much more quick thanks to progress in dev experience in the webdev area.
slikrick 3y ago
if by plethora you mean different web implementations, sure. but there has basically been less than a handful cross platform UI toolkits since GTK/QT