alt Hacker NewsExact – a new cross platform UI framework
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There is already an Exact 2? https://github.com/ccheever/exact2
Immediate thought was the Contract reminds me of QML.
This Exact work looks great and I very much hope it succeeds. Qt has Proven this approach works. Now if these folk at Expo can do it at a price that every dev can afford it will get much wider adoption than Qt.
The world has moved away from JavaScript. With llm, native is easy and the best option even for a single developer.
The idea that agent can built and see it is very important and how I have been building my own GUI framework https://github.com/brainless/akar
I have been using an internal screenshot feature along with a dump of the component tree. Multi-modal LLMs can be used to read the screenshot and fix issues. The dump can be read by any text based LLM. I made my life much easier.
I saw the Blender UI based framework shared on HN the other day and this one today. I am not sure if I want to continue building my own (although all code is written by agents) or if I should switch. I can take inspiration from the two other frameworks and continue with my own.
Since there are no releases, I assuming this is still a WIP? It would explain why they list Linux and then don’t have any screenshots of it next to the other platforms. How it works is kinda light on details. I’m interested to learn more about the under the hood aspects of how they are translating everything to the different native toolkits.
Why isn't Windows supported. Thr largest desktop platform out there?
Ambitious. I’m sure they know what their problems are and how to solve them, as evidenced by the agent being able to control the UI’s timing (and it being mentioned so far up). Getting the agent to get interactivity right is pretty hard otherwise.
This is absolutely huge. If the Expo team can demonstrate that this development strategy is viable, we will finally see a resurgence of native applications and more efficient software, getting rid of the Electron bloat.
It's a long shot for now, though! There are lot of gritty nitty details they have to get right. One of the first issues I can imagine is this framework being great to use with Opus 5.5 but not good enough with i.e. Gemini 4 Argon or DeepSeek v4.1 Flash 1017, due to the overreliance on having AI models write the code.
Funny name because anything "exact" is the last thing you'd expect from this everchanging base
this tendency to prioritize agents over humans for new software DX makes me sympathize with the Butlerian jihad.
Cool toy, but it's unclear when this will be stable enough for production use.
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Whenever I see a DSL where part of the DSL's responsibility is to have arbitrarily complex mathematical expressions, my reactions are (a) why???, (b) well, if they're going to do it, they should have a formal language specification with a derived lexer and parser, and (c) the product needs a robust stdlib with compatibility across build targets.
From what I see in https://github.com/expo/exact/blob/main/contract/syntax/src/... and https://github.com/expo/exact/blob/main/contract/syntax/src/... - it's unclear this will scale to the levels of complexity that arbitrary UIs demand.