Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]

I find it amusing that the paper doesn't include any screenshots. Those were the days!

This should be linked as the original post: https://ir.cwi.nl/pub/5998

It says 1988 there.

It's a neat project. Write cross platform desktop apps in C. Presumably it would not have been very usable in practice in the late 1980s, because of all the OTHER system interfaces that still weren't portable, even if the windowing system was available in a portable way.

I can remember the subsequent period in which Java desktop apps were relatively common. They had cross platform UI by default. But the problem was:

1) cross platform GUIs are ugly by default, compared to fully native desktop apps, because they don't entirely replicate the affordances or the style of the platform;

2) in the Java case, it seemed heavyweight to install and sluggish compared to native apps;

Point 2 would not have applied to stdwin, as it would have produced small compiled binaries I suppose, but Point 1 would have.

So in the end, obviously web apps (and partly, Flash) took over the niche that "cross platform desktop apps" had once tried to fill, and then it was something of a dead zone until Electron, as far as I remember.

How old is this? 1989 or something like that? Guido was probably quite young when he wrote it. Looks like LaTeX?

Edit: Someone else wrote 1988 which I suppose makes sense, as the latest reference at the end is from 1988 too. So then Guido was 32 years old.

(1988)