Puny GUI – A tiny cross platform GUI Kit in Janet

https://ahungry.com/blog/2020-04-24-Puny-GUI-Puppy-Finder.html

by ahungry • 6 years ago

130 97 6 years ago

liuliu• 6 years ago

Seems to be based on iup that supports both Windows and Linux? http://webserver2.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/iup/

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...

mwcampbell8• 6 years ago

The new crop of immediate mode cross platform GUI libraries are more interesting (such as nuklear and Dear Imgui).

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.

flohofwoe2• 6 years ago

This wouldn't be a problem if the underlying operating system APIs wouldn't treat accessibility as an opaque "feature" baked into their UI frameworks.

There should/could be open accessibility APIs in each OS which sit between (e.g.) screenreader software and custom UI frameworks.

andrewnc3• 6 years ago

I love new programming languages, I'll have to give Janet a go and see how I like it

postalrat• 6 years ago

Any language that has really impressed or surprised you?

andrewnc3• 6 years ago

I've really enjoyed J so far. Pointless has been fun. Brat was an interesting one to work with. Pony and Nim are both pleasant. Hy was a fun way to do Numpy lisp.

I'm digging in to Chaos and then Janet after that.

pierrec• 6 years ago

"The solution (hint: there wasn't one until now)..." That's quite the bold statement. I actually thought of IUP/Lua when I saw this line, and it turns out you precisely used IUP for the UI portion of your framework! Except you didn't use the Lua binding, instead you created a Janet binding.

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.

[1] https://github.com/ers35/luastatic

ahungry6• 6 years ago

Yea, sometimes when I get to rambling I can be a little bit overly opinionated/bold in some statements. Python tktinkter is also in a similar vein - what I am putting out is more of an aggregation of other's hard work (cross platform packaging?) more so than anything I've directly innovated.

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).

macmac• 6 years ago

Speaking of aggregation, what motivated the license choice? It appears that only one dependency (Mongooos is GPL), and the choice of GPL will seriously inhibit any adoption of a toolkit like this.

zem• 6 years ago

there are nice chicken scheme bindings for iup as well. http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/5/iup

sdegutis• 6 years ago

This sounds close to the GUI setup I've been looking for: something like Love2d except using Lua to create a WinForms program instead. Which led me to finding http://underpop.free.fr/l/lua/luainterface/ which might just be it.

squarefoot• 6 years ago

Speakig of Lua, there is also TekUI.

http://tekui.neoscientists.org/screenshots.html

crispinb2• 6 years ago

However, the elephant in the room (which I also like to ignore as a Clojure enthusiast) is that the start up time of a Java based GUI app is too slow (this is exacerbated even moreso when Clojure is involved)

I'm expecting a GraalVM rejoinder from someone. For anyone who's used GraalVM (particularly with Clojure) - what are the downsides and limitations?

ahungry6• 6 years ago

This is a really cool usage of it: https://github.com/borkdude/babashka, but last I had checked, it didn't have any GUI integration, and installing the GraalVM to begin with is a very heavyweight install.

crispinb2• 6 years ago

Yes I've installed babashka. It really is a cool project.

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?

pjmlp3• 6 years ago

Java has had AOT compilers since 2000, they just haven't been free beer for the most part, hence why FOSS keeps ignoring them.

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.

brabel2• 6 years ago

A JavaFX hello world app starts in around 1 second on a modern computer. Here's a small demo of a self-updating JavaFX app where you can see it being started, then built again, then re-launched with the new version: https://github.com/renatoathaydes/keepup/blob/master/docs/im...

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.

pjmlp3• 6 years ago

That is a common trend on JVM guest languages, to blame Java or the JVM for their impedance mismatch with the host platform.

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.

brodo• 6 years ago

I'm building a TornadoFX app with Kotlin now and it also starts in about a second. Also there is FXLauncher ( https://github.com/edvin/fxlauncher ) which provides a native package and an auto updater for macOS, Windows and Linux.

ashkankiani• 6 years ago

With opengl, libuv, and libcurl, and Dear Imgui, I can write a C program resulting in a binary that's about 400kB unstripped, to put 5MB in perspective. And for a simple program like what you wrote, I don't even bother trying to free the memory myself sometimes, I just let the OS free it when I exit. With that design choice in mind, the end code is like <1000 lines, and a decent bit is reused snippets.

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.

ahungry6• 6 years ago

Dear imgui looks very cool (I had missed that one), and like nuklear, a strong candidate for very customized look and feel - but I think it glosses over things much like nuklear does, by showing what seems to be small/simple samples, and prefixing it with a statement such as "after it's set up" (and it doesn't bother to show the other 1000 lines said setup required).

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).

exDM694• 6 years ago

Those "1000 lines of boilerplate" is why imgui and nuklear are so popular. If you're on a commonly used platform, say SDL and OpenGl, you can just copy all or most of it. But the magic here is that imgui and nuklear will integrate into any engine or rendering api you can imagine.

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.

_emacsomancer_2• 6 years ago

What about macOS? So far Racket seems like the easiest solution for a lisp with easy cross-platform GUI support (Linux, Mac, Windows). It would be nice to have more easy choices, but also nice if all 3 major platforms were supported.

brabel2• 6 years ago

Racket is so nice, but try to create a GUI with it and see how heavy the resulting app is... I wrote a simple one just to play around with it, but was really disappointed by how slow and heavy it was.. it took over 250MB of RAM to show a shape on the screen.

DagAgren5• 6 years ago

In reality, if you want to actually make a serious, usable and comfortable GUI, there is no cross-platform solution. There are many attempts, but none will let you create a GUI that actually fulfils all those requirements.

If you are making something serious, you will have to implement at least the GUI layer separately for all platforms.

yellowapple3• 6 years ago

In reality, if you want to actually make a serious, usable and comfortable GUI, there is no cross-platform solution

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).

BubRoss2• 6 years ago

Why do I keep seeing people say this? People have been doing this for 30 years.

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?

catalogia• 6 years ago

I've been using racket/gui for a while now. It only comes with a small handful of widgets; if you want to use racket/gui for anything beyond the bare basics, you'll be implementing a lot of your own widgets. Want a text-field% with autocompletion? You'll have to write that yourself.

_emacsomancer_2• 6 years ago

Sure. But having even basic crossplatform GUI support baked in is a pretty major thing. I haven't tried to work with McCLIM before (and it's not crossplatform anyway) and the other Common Lisp option is Qtools, which seems rather more complicated than the integrated GUI stuff in Racket.

FraKtus5• 6 years ago

I disagree with the author, it's really easy to test the examples of Nuklear.

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.

DagAgren5• 6 years ago

You're still going to be updating at 60 FPS which will absolutely murder your battery on a mobile device.

These are meant for use in games that already do this. They are not suitable for building regular apps.

maeln• 6 years ago

They are perfectly suitable for regular app. You don't need to update them at 60fps, you have the entire control of the rendering state, so you could decide to update the gui whenever it is needed and not at a constant fps.

FraKtus5• 6 years ago

You can update when you want and only on changes if it works better for your case.

ducktective• 6 years ago

I think Nuklear had an option for dynamic update rate. Not sure though

flohofwoe2• 6 years ago

The common solution is to only update rendering when input happens, and otherwise sleep. That's fairly common for ImGui applications outside games (in games it doesn't make sense of course, since those usually render each frame anyway).

amelius3• 6 years ago

I made applications with Nuklear that runs on Android, iOS, macOS, Windows and share the same main C code.

How do you even compile C code for Android / PlayStore?

asdf10• 6 years ago

You use the Android Native Development Kit (NDK) https://developer.android.com/ndk

wjbr• 6 years ago

https://developer.android.com/ndk

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.

FraKtus5• 6 years ago

I use Visual Studio on Windows with Android (NDK) integration.

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.

mwcampbell8• 6 years ago

I hope the applications you made with Nuklear and Dear ImGui were only for fun, and not important for someone's job, education, or other essential tasks, because those toolkits have zero accessibility, e.g. for blind people with screen readers, as well as people with other disabilities (e.g. those who require voice or other alternative input methods).

FraKtus5• 6 years ago

For a fun way to say it, I work in the Rock and Roll business, seriously entertainment.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6i-5tD8y40

CharlesMerriam2• 6 years ago

How about English? This is just programed as:

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

> Problems?

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.

asimjalis• 6 years ago

Neat. Are there screenshots?

vidugavia• 6 years ago

Cool. I fell in love with Janet during last advent of code, so I'll definitely give it a try

csb6• 6 years ago

For anyone needing a simple and fast cross-platform toolkit for C++, FLTK is really good. It is easy to build and statically link only the parts you need, and the API/widget selection is pretty good. It looks a little old school/non/native, but it has been useful for me.

Rochus3• 6 years ago

FLTK is just very spartan compared to e.g. Qt; from my point of view it is only useful for very simple GUIs; I hardly have any applications anymore that do not need item views or rich text.

MaxBarraclough4• 6 years ago

If you want a halfway house, there's the FOX Toolkit. http://fox-toolkit.org/

It's not so active these days, admittedly.

amelius3• 6 years ago

Does it support mobile?

I think "cross-platform" should include mobile.

progre• 6 years ago

That definition of cross-platform is a bit too narrow for my taste. I think a more reasonable definition of "cross-platform" would be "covers 2 or more roughly equal platforms". I mean no-one expects an app developed for a windows workstation to run (and be usable) on an andriod phone, even if it used a cross platform framework. But most would expect to be able to run it on linux or mac.

bmn__• 6 years ago

Subtracting all the delusional fluff about small sizes, this article is about a Janet binding to Gtk3.

ldd app.bin|rg -o '/usr/lib[^ ]+'|xargs stat -L -c %s|perl -lne'$s += $_; END {print $s}'

38120904

mwcampbell8• 6 years ago

Actually it's about a Janet binding to IUP. The key difference is that on Windows, IUP uses native controls, whereas GTK does not.

overgard2• 6 years ago

GUI frameworks are big because they do a lot. These minimalist things usually only work until you reach the limits of what they can do and then you have to rewrite in something like Qt anyway, or sacrifice what your users want in a GUI for your own code aesthetics.

mwcampbell8• 6 years ago

Well said. And remember, it's not just what your users want, but what some of them need, e.g. accessibility. Enough said about that. :)

davidcuddeback2• 6 years ago

It’s be helpful to have some concrete examples of where one might run into limits with the minimalist frameworks and why a larger framework is required to overcome those limits.

mwcampbell8• 6 years ago

Two words: internationalization and accessibility.

rootlocus• 6 years ago

Tables, tree views, popup menus, floating / docking windows, flexible layouts, file dialogs, animations.

overgard2• 6 years ago

file open/save dialogs, i18n, drag and drop, image formats, web views, any sort of accessibility, themability that actually fits into native platforms, sometimes the ability to open new windows, many common controls that we just take for granted now that you have to implement yourself, sometimes limited amount of events you can reasonably handle based on the design of the api (IM gui's for instance).

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.

oefrha• 6 years ago

It doesn’t even take much to reach the limits of tiny GUI toolkits. Very common things like native file/directory selection dialog (preferably with format/suffix filtering) rule out a whole slew of “tiny GUI toolkits”. You can use a puny GUI and find out halfway that widgets you need just aren’t there or require tremendous customization efforts, or you can use Qt and have the widest selection while conforming to accessibility standards and at the same time not look like crap. The choice is obvious to me (after hard-earned lessons).

ChickeNES• 6 years ago

Very common things like native file/directory selection dialog (preferably with format/suffix filtering) rule out a whole slew of “tiny GUI toolkits”

I've found nativefiledialog to be quite good for that use case

MaxBarraclough4• 6 years ago

Is Qt so bad by modern standards? Admittedly I don't have hard numbers, but I believe it's far less bloaty than Electron, even when using its web-like features (QML and JavaScript).

Let's not forget just how low the bar has been set by Electron. Microsoft Teams manages to use 600MB of RAM.

FraKtus5• 6 years ago

The opposite is true, people move away from Qt because even if it's more complete it's also heavy. Of course, it has internationalization and accessibility. The smaller API, higher performance, faster development of Dear Imgui is more important for me.

Some reported that moving from Qt to Dear Imgui resulted in a codebase three-time smaller.

coleifer• 6 years ago

Tcl/Tk dabs on your gui frameworks from the unreachable pinnacle of the heavens.

9214• 6 years ago

Interesting pitch for Janet. Here [1] is a quick rewrite in Red language, which lives up to the author's requirements: 10 LOC, native support for all 3 major platforms, can be shipped as a single binary, and all that's required is a 1MB toolchain.

[1] https://gist.github.com/9214/dfa15d37342065dbf368eae35abcdc3...

Puny GUI – A tiny cross platform GUI Kit in Janet

Related Stories