it seems ridiculous that we have to embed an entire browser, meant for internet web browsing, just to create a cross-platform UI with moderate ease.
Why are native or semi-native UI frameworks lagging so far behind? am I wrong in thinking this? are there easier, declarative frameworks for creating semi-native UIs on desktop that don’t look like windows 1998?
The real question is how we got any portable solution to this problem in the first place.
To me problems are fundamentally economic and political, not technical. For example, the unique circumstances that led to a portable web standard involved multiple major interventions against Microsoft by antitrust regulators (in 2001, 2006, 2009, 2013, etc). The other tech giants were happy to go along with this as a way to break microsoft’s monopoly. Very soon after, Google and Apple put the walls straight back up with mobile apps.
If you go back before HTML, OS research was progressing swiftly towards portable, high-level networked GUI technology via stuff like smalltalk. Unfortunately all of the money was mysteriously pulled from those research groups after Apple and Microsoft stole all the smalltalk research and turned it into a crude walled garden of GUI apps, then started printing money faster than the US Mint.
Whenever you see progress towards portable solutions, such as Xamarin and open source C#, React Native, or even Flutter, it is usually being funded by a company that lost a platform war and is now scrambling to build some awkward metaplatform on top of everyone else’s stuff. It never really works.
One exception is webassembly, which was basically forced into existence against everyone’s will by some ingenious troublemakers at Mozilla. That’s a whole other story though!
Check out kotlin compose multiplatform. Takes the Android declarative jetpack compose UI framework and makes it run cross platform. You get most of the modern UX conveniences from Android, can reuse libraries etc. Works with either JVM or compiling to native code too.
There’s https://redbean.dev/, but it’s not quite what you mean.
It runs on the browser with a local host reference to a lua server with access to c libs.
It depends on just how “cross-platform” you want to make it. If you came up with another standards-based UI framework that had the same cross-platform penetration of web browsers, then you’ll have effectively reinvented the browser. For everything else, you can basically pick a maximum of two: cross-platform, native, and easy.
Never expected to see imgui mentioned in one sentence with flutter ngl
