Favorite GUI library?

[Chris]

On Monday, 23 April 2018 at 14:38:44 UTC, TheGag96 wrote:

>
> That's definitely what I'm trying to avoid... I feel those 
> kinds of interfaces are 99% of the time mega bloated for what 
> they are. Discord is the only one that seemed big enough for 
> the britches of an entire browser instance. Absolutely not a 
> fan of Electron and the like.
>
> I have never tried dwt! I should give that a shot. And I was 
> trying gtkd once, and I should probably try again. Back then, I 
> had to compile with --build=plain due to some weird linker 
> issues.

The advantage of using web technologies for UI:

- high re-usability: use the same or similar layout+functionality 
for desktop, Android/iPhone apps and web based UIs.
- freedom as to layout and theming with CSS (highly customizable 
for users too)
- cross platform: no need to deploy libs (e.g. Gtk on Mac and 
Windows)
- maintenance: older JS code / CSS will still be ok in _most_ 
cases, whereas Gtk and other frameworks introduce depractaions 
and breaking changes so that you have to a) rewrite parts of your 
code and b) maintain older (outdated) versions of the program 
until you can be sure that the older libs are no longer used / 
distributed
- distribution: While users don't care about your maintenance 
costs, they do care about having an app available on their smart 
phones/desktops/online. So multiply various versions of say a Gtk 
app by platform (_at least_ you have to maintain 2Gtk*3Platform = 
6 apps). Users hate being told that it only works on Linux 
desktop. Thus, web technologies can be a real gain.
- progress: web technologies have made huge progress JS and CSS 
are much better now. Layout and js engines are much smarter as 
well. So you benefit from this and get it more or less for free 
on every platform.