Cross platform GUIs and Nim macros

http://serv.peterme.net/devlog/cross-platform-guis-and-nim-macros.html

by dom96 • 9 years ago

119 88 9 years ago

serv.peterme.net

awinter-py3• 9 years ago

took me a second to realize how important this is; my brain dismissed the final solution as 'so what, that's just like HTML'.

then I got it -- the ability to use code generation to be declarative is incredible.

having the ability to mix declarative (HTML / data structures) and imperative (javascript) is what makes react so powerful. The ability to do that almost-natively inside the language is amazing.

nikki93• 9 years ago

Yeah I think one of the main things that React offers is a DSL for trees (JSX) that can lexically close over and also splice in JavaScript. Languages that allow creating your own DSLs offer this for other realms such as shader coding, logic programming etc. within the metalanguage.

draegtun• 9 years ago

Languages that allow creating your own DSLs offer this for other realms...

Rebol & Red are examples of this, there's a GUI dialect called VID [1][2] and in companion with this is a Draw dialect [3][4].

1. http://rebol.com/docs/easy-vid.html

2. https://doc.red-lang.org/en/vid.html

3. http://www.rebol.com/docs/draw.html

4. https://doc.red-lang.org/en/draw.html

paxcoder2• 9 years ago

Where do you see behavior mixing with presentation in wxnim's GenUI? The only thing that the macro is used for, besides saying what to draw and how, is to define events that the elements emit.

awinter-py3• 9 years ago

you're asking from an MVC perspective?

This approach lets you blur the lines between MVC responsibilities. If you wanted to create a widget that had some traditionally 'business-logic' role (like network sync or database interaction) you could do that. I'm not recommending that but there's value in flexibility.

norswap2• 9 years ago

Why does the fact that GTK "looks non-native on Windows" disqualify it? If it's pretty enough for Linux, isn't also good enough for Windows? (Also my personal opinion is that it doesn't look too bad.)

casion• 9 years ago

With GUIs, consistency is the primary concern followed by 'pretty'.

Non-native breaks consistency, rendering 'pretty' fairly meaningless.

thomastjeffery4• 9 years ago

That's an absurd notion. Is chrome inconsistent because it doesn't look like a GUI toolkit?

j3097736• 9 years ago

Looking at something like gsmartcontrol I can only spot the few icons being different than the shell32 ones, so it's still more consistent than most commercial software.

norswap2• 9 years ago

Consistency is non-existent amongst apps. Even on OSX, for all their insistence on their Human Interfaces Guideline, the experience of using multiple apps is still a patchwork of styles. If your needs are fairly generic, you can assemble a fairly consistent set of apps, if you accept some that are crippled or plain lousy.

Not personal but I can't resist: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." (Emerson)

to3m• 9 years ago

Why should anybody have to put up with non-standard UI and behaviour?

(Case in point: the very website's scrolling. Works great on desktop Firefox, not obviously distinguishable from any other website. On iOS... a sad joke, made at the user's expense.)

binarycrusader• 9 years ago

Except they already do, every day in multiple applications such as:

Spotify

Microsoft Office

NetFlix

Chrome

FireFox

...the list goes on. There is no such thing as a standard UI or behaviour at this point.

Any one that owns a mobile device already has to be used to a mixture of UIs every time they switch between devices or specific applications.

thomastjeffery4• 9 years ago

Behavior I can understand, but there is nothing difficult to "put up with" about the look of gtk or qt in Windows.

tedmiston3• 9 years ago

I couldn't actually read the entire article on iOS because of the weird scrolling on a large block of code that more than filled the entire screen.

mwcampbell• 9 years ago

GTK is also totally inaccessible to blind people, and possibly people with other disabilities as well, on Windows and Mac. I'm guessing you don't want to accidentally block people from using your application.

tluyben2• 9 years ago

Do Gtk programs on Windows or Mac have the same, non native file selector dialog? I mostly use Linux (Ubuntu with i3wm) for coding and what annoys me most on daily basis are the file pickers on different applications. They are not only inconsistent, they are also all bad compared to Windows and Mac. It takes me far more time to select files than on the other platforms. Granted I use it mostly by far when webbrowsing as I use the commandline mostly but still at least a few times per day. I cannot check if Win or Mac Gtk apps use the platform picker or a Gtk one: if the latter, that would stop me from deploying software in Gtk on other platforms.

mushiake• 9 years ago

Gtk3 has native file chooser api (only for windows, no mac one yet).

tonyedgecombe3• 9 years ago

I think it just depends on the nature of the software, if it's something I used every day I want as close an integration with the platform as possible. On the other hand if it was something I used once a month to manage my payroll for example I wouldn't worry too much.

dom03• 9 years ago

In 2012 I could pack a whole Python interpreter, Qt and various image-processing libraries into an InnoSetup installer that just-so scratched the 12 MB mark; I doubt this has changed significantly.

Contrary to what the linked (more interesting) survey article suggests, Qt is usually the answer to most issues when it comes to cross-platform UI.

Gtk is not bad, but Gtk is what it is: it was created because Qt couldn't be used for licensing concerns (at the time) by people unexperienced with the matter (compared to the Trolltech staff), and is maintained by people who, for the most part, care about Linux. Qt on the other hand is supported commercially, and puts far more effort into supporting more platforms better. [Also the tooling and docs are really nice].

vog• 9 years ago

Side note:

Back when I did Win32 packaging of cross-platform applications, I never liked InnoSetup much, mostly because of the many levels of unpacking into temporary directories, but also because it was relatively slow and not as compact as it could be. Instead, I always preferred NSIS using the makensis command.

Among others, NSIS can be compiled on *nix systems, but still produces a Windows executable file (like a cross compiler), so you can put it in your cross compiling toolchain. That way, you can create your full Windows port including installer without ever having to touch a Windows.

tonyedgecombe3• 9 years ago

Interesting, I've always been a huge fan of InnoSetup, I've used it for many projects a couple of which had very complex installation requirements.

dom03• 9 years ago

InnoSetup was very easy to get started with and get the expected results, while NSIS looked more complex. I'm not particularly opinionated about installers as long as they install and uninstall things :)

kevin_thibedeau• 9 years ago

You could trim that down more with tkinter + Tix for native widgets.

dom03• 9 years ago

Maybe, but what would be the point? I knew Qt already (although it's pretty easy to get started), and the UI of the application was quite complex and even with Qt had some custom, complex UI widgets (a node-graph editor, keyframing widgets etc.) -- although these were quite easy to implement on top of QGraphicsView. I'd expect that it would've been more effort to develop that with something like Tk.

mhd2• 9 years ago

While I agree about the respective qualities of the toolkits, if I remember correctly Gtk wasn't initially a replacement for Qt, but for Motif. The first version of Gimp was using that, and there was quite a bit of animosity against C++ back in those days.

They still could've tried to contribute to LessTif or at least created a new Xt-based toolkit instad of creating yet another overly verbose C OO system...

beagle33• 9 years ago

GTK was created for Gimp.The acronym was literally "Gimp ToolKit". It was adopted by the Gnome people, for the reasons you stated (KDE used Qt and the license issue was yet unresolved at the time). And for writing a PhotoShop-style program, at the time, it provided a lot that Qt couldn't.

In fact, Gimp stayed on GTK1 years after everyone else moved to GTK2.

Lammy• 9 years ago

The state of the Web in 2017: This page is nothing but text but just renders as a blank page until you allow JavaScript

pwg2• 9 years ago

Or, until you turn off CSS (firefox: View->Page Style->No Style).

Then all the text appears, even without any JS running.

progman4• 9 years ago

Nice! Is there also a way to print the text? I just get almost empty pages.

analognoise3• 9 years ago

A better solution: FreePascal + Lazarus. Cross Platform. Native. Compiled. A RAD tool that is tough to match.

jadbox• 9 years ago

First time I've heard of using FreePascal + Lazarus. Any success stories?

analognoise3• 9 years ago

I coded a viewer for a binary file format reader at work that launched Octave via a TProcess and communicated with it over pipes. Rather than rewrite the Matlab that did the file processing, I just called the same functions our analysis guys were using. To get the data into Pascal, I had Matlab write binary files to disk and then read them in - this is because the pipe implementation on Windows (it was faster than the pipe).

Then I used the BGRABitmap's BGRACanvas as a component to draw the bitmap images (frames of data). To this I added some crosshairs. There is also a chart component that displays the data that makes up our range calculation.

It came to ~5MB executable, one non portable function (I asked Windows the size of the file Octave is writing until it returns the correct value, and I block on it - not bright, but easy to do. I prime the message pump with Application.ProcessMessage in that loop so the user doesn't see the blocking action.

I compressed the executable down to 1.5MB, just to see how far it would go. The project is portable to Linux except for the one function (which will go in an ifdef when I get around to it).

All of this with visual feedback, no make files, and 100% free as in freedom, Borland/Embarcadero can't take it from me, can't "change directions to focus on Enterprise", whatever.

The community is amazing, and answered all of my questions, and many of them really know their shit.

I can't recommend it enough.

squarefoot• 9 years ago

+1. Unfortunately it pays the "not being C, C++ or Python" tax in having therefore much less popularity than GUIs based on the above, but to me is among the best solutions around. http://www.lazarus-ide.org/

edit: ...And it produces working GUI applications on *PI boards too (ARM). That's one big step beyond being Linux+Mac+Windows only.

bsder• 9 years ago

Recommending Delphi (or something compatible like FreePascal) is not going to win you my support.

Every Delphi-based app I have used has been a horrible bodge of bugs.

clouddrover2• 9 years ago

I think that would have more to do with the applications themselves as opposed to anything intrinsic to Delphi. I've used plenty of applications written in Delphi and they've worked fine. Skype for Windows was written with Delphi (and maybe still is).

Delphi's pretty good. You should try it out: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi

mhd2• 9 years ago

I would guess that's mostly a result of a lot of them being Q&D ("RAD") database CRUD interfaces, done on contract by a single developer, rarely touched again. Those tend to be awful in every language.

It's been a while, but I think my main complaint about Delphi was grid-based layouts and the static interfaces it creates. Fast, but usually don't respond well to resizing.

mtkd• 9 years ago

I had a look at this again a few months back - Lazarus is where I got to also - but it felt a bit of an underwhelming/complicated solution esp. if you used Delphi or even VB 20 years ago

more and more people are talking about it again now - even though most of the current tooling hotness is focused on mobile

maybe something will come out of the .NET Core projects now it's all open source - it feels like that has most potential right now

there is a huge gap in the enterprise software market for a simple cross-platform app framework with intuitive ways to interface to SQL and web APIs - suitable for accounts juniors to build small data apps (instead of bending Excel macros round the problem) but also suitable to build high-function business apps (instead of pretty but barely usable web apps every business I know has on life-support which nobody dare touch)

clouddrover2• 9 years ago

there is a huge gap in the enterprise software market for a simple cross-platform app framework with intuitive ways to interface to SQL and web APIs

I'd say that's the target market for Delphi. It's expensive but effective.

theprotocol• 9 years ago

Thanks for posting this. I've just reached the point where I need to look around for a cross-platform RAD tool for a side-project which will require a lot of experimentation, so this is fortuitous timing. :)

MaxLeiter2• 9 years ago

Speaking of cross platform UIs, on iOS the page hijacks scrolling so you can't scroll past the wx widget code segment.

cstrahan• 9 years ago

I came here to comment on that as well.

I tried flicking the page right above the code fragment, but it turns out the scroll hijacking disables iOS's native inertial scrolling, so there's no way for me to read the rest of the article until I get back to my desktop.

I don't see the need for down-votes here: clearly many authors (in absolute terms, if not relative terms) tease their viewers with 30 minutes of reading, only to frustrate them by making the rest of the page inadvertently unreachable. I would think of these kinds of comments as a courtesy to the author.

tedmiston3• 9 years ago

I also hit this very frustrating point in the article on iOS where it became impossible to scroll further.

bilkow• 9 years ago

You can read the article normally by using reader view on both Safari and Firefox, which make almost any article better to read anyway, at the expense that code blocks won't be properly formatted (in this case, on some sites code blocks just disappear).

thomastjeffery4• 9 years ago

It seems like the only real complaint this article addresses is that gtk (or other non-native toolkits) add a ~20mb dependency, and Windows didn't have a good package manager (since static compilation is preferred).

Frankly, this is a non issue. Windows users are used to this. It comes with the territory. Toolkits like GTK and Qt are full featured, densely documented, fast, look good, and work well in any OS.

lappet• 9 years ago

So I have used wxWidgets in the past with the help of python bindings and enjoyed using it and my end product. I hear electron[1] is picking up these days for cross-platform dev - anyone got experience with it?

[1] https://electron.atom.io/

MaxLeiter2• 9 years ago

An electron app ships with chromium; major unnecessary bloat. Check out electron file sizes.

laumars3• 9 years ago

Only from an end user perspective and frankly I hate it. It has all the size and performance problems complained about in that article but without the benefit of native widgets. And frankly if I wanted to run a web app on my desktop then I'd rather run it in my preferred browser.

I know I'm getting old (in IT terms) and grumpy but I'm unconvinced our current frontend web stack are the right tools for modern web development; albeit it's what we're stuck with. So I'm even less convinced that it's the right stack for "native" desktop applications.

thomastjeffery4• 9 years ago

It has all the size and performance problems complained about in that article

Complaining about electron being bloated now is just like complaining about gtk being bloated back in the 90s.

ekvintroj• 9 years ago

This post is like a copy paste of this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13952007

Entangled• 9 years ago

Why not using YAML for the UI definition? Easier, simpler and universal.

corysama• 9 years ago

There is a project to get IUP working on OSX.

https://github.com/ewmailing/IupCocoa

ewmailing• 9 years ago

And also iOS, Android, and a native web browser backend via Emscripten :)

This was a proposal/prototype/intro video for IUP for iOS & Android for the IUP community.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvrEfOg3Nyk

Repos:

https://github.com/ewmailing/IupCocoaTouch

https://github.com/ewmailing/IupAndroid

https://github.com/ewmailing/IupEmscripten

AsyncAwait4• 9 years ago

I am looking for a cross-platform GUI library that feels native across Mac/Win/Linux and has well maintained bindings in a language that is not C++ - an impossible task it seems.

jackmott• 9 years ago

making bindings isnt too hard

AsyncAwait4• 9 years ago

Quick and dirty bindings? No. Ones that actually take into account the idioms of the host language and build idiomatic abstractions around the raw bindings? Not necessarily hard, but requires a significant time investment.

vsakos• 9 years ago

Go + Qt and/or QML

AsyncAwait4• 9 years ago

Yeah, https://github.com/therecipe/qt seems like the best option right now...

progman4• 9 years ago

GtkAda is a binding for Ada. Ada is like Pascal but much more powerful. GTK is available for Linux, Windows and OSX. However, you could also use Qt and import from C++ to Ada.

http://www.ada2012.org/

http://www.adacore.com/gtkada/

http://compgroups.net/comp.lang.ada/gtkada-for-macos-x/14082...

https://www.gtk.org/download/windows.php

AsyncAwait4• 9 years ago

That's a very interesting solution. I've been curious about Ada for a long time, but never found a reason to use it for anything - this might be it!

Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

devwastaken2• 9 years ago

I've been struggling with finding a good cross-platform C#/.NET framework that can tie into Visual Studio.

So far, you're making your entire UI in code (Like WxWidgets), having to use an app like XamarinStudio to even get fully packaged OSX apps, along with requiring an external framework such as https://github.com/picoe/Eto, (its official package is broken in Xamarin though)

I understand that win forms may not be great when you start to build a bigger application with a lot more presentation and data, but it makes building simple apps easy and convenient. We need something like that cross-platform.

If anyone knows more about re-creating windows form apps cross-platform in a nice manner, I'd appreciate the info.

kodablah3• 9 years ago

I don't spend much time w/ that stack, but Avalonia [1] seems to be a big player. Even better, they recently merged .Net core support [2]. You of course lose some native look and feel.

1 - https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia 2 - https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/issues/314#issuecomme...

devwastaken2• 9 years ago

What is the benefit of .net Core and how would that be used in comparison to .net Framework 4.5?

tonyedgecombe3• 9 years ago

Winforms is rapid until you want to make your app support high dpi, then it all starts to get quite cumbersome.

marvy• 9 years ago

No one mentions fltk? I never used it, but is there some reason it's unsuitable?

beagle33• 9 years ago

FLTK is extremely lightweight and easy to use, and quite fast to boot. It doesn't integrate very well with e.g. platform accessibility hooks and stuff like that (but then, not many toolkits do). Highly recommended if you're using C++.

FLTK's major problem is that it is too much of a C++ system; while wrappers for some languages exist, a lot of the properties that make it desirable in C++ are lost through those wrappers.

i336_2• 9 years ago

The language itself also has some serious race conditions that are impossible to debug unless you're on really slow/embedded hardware. For example, I used the Dillo web browser (which is FLTK-based) for a couple years when I was stuck on an 800MHz PC, and when the system was swapping heavily, doing things like opening the (FLTK-generated) file-save dialog or dragging a window scrollbar (IIRC) would lock the mouse - FLTK uses X11 cursor locks to constrain the cursor in some situations, and due to the system's heavy I/O load, FLTK wasn't releasing the locks, and I had to kill the entire browser.

legulere• 9 years ago

Even with cross platform toolkits you will never have apps that feel right.

The right(TM) way to do it is to write a GUI for each platform separately.

gribbly• 9 years ago

Actually I would prefer a GUI emerging which is the same across all platforms (except the lowest parts of the plumbing I suppose).

OpenGL would be a good candidate for rendering.

kodablah3• 9 years ago

I wish someone would pick back up wxc, the C interface for wxWidgets. IIRC the latest updates are in the wxc folder of wxHaskell [1]. That any non-C++ language is able to somewhat "import C++" (i.e. Nim and D) is nice and all, but doesn't really help the larger community and can be brittle in some C++ situations.

1 - https://github.com/wxHaskell/wxHaskell

progman4• 9 years ago

Brilliant idea! The code sample is the most clean GUI code I have ever seen. However, I haven't coded GUI for a very long time, so it may be that there are also other good GUI APIs which I don't know about.

Nevertheless, this DSL reveals how powerful Nim actually is. It seems many developers have not realized it yet. With Nim they get C performance, seamless C FFI, and a very expressive pythonic syntax. I am using Nim for years now, and it's amazing how productive coding can be.

ndh2• 9 years ago

the most clean GUI code I have ever seen

That's because it doesn't actually do anything...

vfclists• 9 years ago

Do most GUI toolkit whinges ever come to accept the fact that most of these issues would go way if Trolltech/Qt/Digia/Nokia would actually bite the bullet and create a simple C interface to the C++ that even other C++ compilers cannot link cleanly to?

C++ and its co conspirator Javascript have done so much to hinder programming development over the past 20 years.

Linux has been round for over and there isn't a decent opensource graphical debugger for Linux that Visual Studio will have to step in some time in the future. All this is soooo depressing.

Cross platform GUIs and Nim macros

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