alt Hacker NewsThis looks good. But the thing that always lets me down on UI frameworks is how much freaking work it is to get something on the screen. My first language was Borland Turbo C++. It was so comparatively simple to do stuff. If I want to write a circle on the screen its just this:
#include <graphics.h> #include <conio.h>
int main() { int gd = DETECT, gm;
initgraph(&gd, &gm, "C:\\TURBOC3\\BGI");
circle(320, 240, 100);
getch();
closegraph();
return 0;Making some shapes and forms wasn't that much work either.
If I think back to VB and Windows (whatever it was then) making a basic window, form and some buttons was so simple and easy, they even made GUI builders because they were so good.
Somewhere along the lines GUIs became overly complex to implement.
Replies
OK, but what about actually using a GUI toolkit to make an actual application?
You can optimize a library to make it comparatively simple to draw a circle on a screen. But that tells me nothing about binding state, signals, styling, widget hierarchy, etc. Maybe these frameworks look complicated to you because doing something more than drawing a circle is actually more complicated.
So VB6 or earlier is what you are probably remembering, and VB has a fascinating history as it started life as a wysiwyg design tool before it was attached to any language.
However, you need to remember that these simpler tools were a product of a much simpler set of requirements. Fixed themes, fixed screen size, fixed aspect ratios. I imagine a wysiwyg editor that gives you all the power of, say, CSS, and yet remains simple for simple things, sounds like a much more difficult task. I haven’t worked on UI in 20 years, so maybe such tools do exist.
Latest way to do native Windows GUI in Rust is pretty cool:
https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1tql7uf/microsofts_wi...
100% Agreed. My first language was LibertyBASIC. It had everything a kid could want to make a paint program that had (at the time) more features than MSPaint, or whatever little game. Menu bars, undo/redo, dialogue windows, panes, sprites, sound, etc.
Compared to the effort:quality of something like tkinter, LibertyBASIC put it to shame! Not to throw shade, tkinter is perfectly fine but I don't think I would have cared for it at that age.
It also taught me how to pirate software, when I found out the borland compiler required to make .exe's I could give my friends was $200 :)
This is what you can with Qt:
#include <QApplication>
#include <QWidget>
#include <QPainter>
class widget : public QWidget {
void paintEvent(QPaintEvent*) override {
QPainter(this).drawEllipse(QPoint(320, 240), 100, 100);
}
};
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
QApplication app(argc, argv);
widget w;
w.resize(640, 480);
w.show();
return app.exec();
}
I know I must be underthinking this, but I really don't know why native toolkits can't just implement some codegen thing that takes XML and produces the above.
Like, all of that should be expressable with just