[HN Gopher] Slint: Native GUI Toolkit for Rust, C++ or JavaScript
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       Slint: Native GUI Toolkit for Rust, C++ or JavaScript
        
       Author : surrTurr
       Score  : 93 points
       Date   : 2022-03-26 09:51 UTC (13 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | 999900000999 wrote:
       | What a strange license.
       | 
       | Can you at least tell us how much it costs to use ?
       | 
       | While you have a right to make money, when you don't even state
       | how much it is, that makes me assume it's too expensive.
       | 
       | The ambassador license is also really really strange, what do you
       | mean I can use it but I need to promote it.
        
       | djxfade wrote:
       | The widgets are not very mobile friendly. But cool concept. How
       | does this compare to Flutter?
        
       | paulryanrogers wrote:
       | This doesn't appear to actually be leveraging native controls.
       | Rather looks like native. Unless I'm missing something?
        
         | irq-1 wrote:
         | It produces native code. Confusing since GUI and Native usually
         | means controls.
        
           | littlestymaar wrote:
           | In this case I think it just means "no electron" which is
           | seducing in itself.
        
             | supah wrote:
             | it does provide native widgets which can be used. If you
             | care to look through the documentation there are images
             | displaying the control widgets / native components
        
         | nu11ptr wrote:
         | It wrapped Qt last I checked (a few months back)
        
           | ahartmetz wrote:
           | That is only for platform styles. It's a small part of a GUI
           | toolkit.
        
       | salmo wrote:
       | Bold move not adding the LGPL or other more open license for a
       | library. I get it. They want it used for OSS or get paid. But I
       | think that limits the user base and therefore its appeal to folks
       | who would actually pay for it.
       | 
       | It really will need to provide a superior technical product and
       | more efficient dev experience like Qt did before Gtk "caught up"
       | and forced the Qt license change.
       | 
       | If I'm a company, I'd rather use something I could hire folks who
       | have experience with it unless it met those criteria. This is a
       | crowded space, unlike "modern" X11 GUI frameworks at the time of
       | Qt/early KDE.
       | 
       | From the look, there's no real differentiation here from the rest
       | of the crowd. Maybe they'll hit that. As a big company, I'd pay
       | for "support" for both that aspect and for input into the
       | direction of the product. My big company does this for most OSS.
       | But I don't do GUI dev in real life.
       | 
       | I won't ever use it personally because:
       | 
       | a) I won't pay for it for a hobby project. I'm probably going to
       | go actual native and just hit 1 platform and do native on another
       | if there's demand. If I'm going cross platform, I'm just going to
       | do what everyone does these days: hit the web and forget about
       | "native." Then use something clunky like Electron if I managed to
       | be successful and folks wanted a local app.
       | 
       | b) I'm not going to license any OSS I make w/ the GPLv3+.
       | Personal preference. Maybe enough people will disagree for them
       | to get a user base.
       | 
       | It's a shame. I wanted to like it just because I love the band
       | Slint.
        
         | pcthrowaway wrote:
         | Have other people done this dual commercial/GPL license before?
         | Doesn't selling it under a (non-free) commercial license go
         | against everything the FSF stands for?
        
           | colejohnson66 wrote:
           | Qt famously is dual commercial/LGPL licensed. And while a
           | commercial offering does go against the FSF's ideals, it's a
           | necessary evil in some circumstances.
        
       | 29athrowaway wrote:
       | The checkboxes in the webassembly demo would look much better
       | with a 1 or 2 px margin.
        
       | camgunz wrote:
       | I love using the GPL3 + commercial here. I know there's a strong
       | bias against the GPL broadly, but pairing it with a commercial
       | option is really pragmatic in a world where you have FOSS devs
       | trying to contribute to the canon of free software and commercial
       | enterprises trying to generate profit. I hope this bias
       | dissipates, because I think it solves a lot of problems, in
       | particular with SaaS/cloud companies reselling FOSS products and
       | using scale/monopoly status to eat the market.
        
       | pcr910303 wrote:
       | Honestly the macOS port looks very non-native to me -- the black
       | text in the selected tag gives me a very Qt/Swing feel... I'm
       | very sure that Slint isn't leveraging the platform native
       | libraries. Very unfortunate.
        
         | nu11ptr wrote:
         | Last I checked they used Qt underneath. Not quite sure what
         | their definition of 'native' is, but I was disappointed as well
         | for that reason.
        
           | vlovich123 wrote:
           | Looks like Qt is one available backend and they have a
           | OpenGL-based one as well.
        
       | homarp wrote:
       | previously SixtyFPS Becomes Slint -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30298534
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26958154 has more info, in
       | particular https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26958290 gives
       | more background: SixtyFPS is a project started by Simon Hausmann
       | and Olivier Goffart who previously worked on Qt at Trolltech.
        
       | bit-rot wrote:
       | Any intentional relation to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slint
       | ?
        
       | riquito wrote:
       | This is actually impressive. A (future) competitor to gtk / qt,
       | written by ex QT developers, low footprint, multi platform, multi
       | arch, and if I get it right compiles natively in rust without
       | gcc/llvm.
        
         | a9h74j wrote:
         | Apparently compiles a slint ui markup language to inform a
         | slint runtime and in doing so provide required hooks to
         | business logic in rust, c++, etc.
         | 
         | Also as I read it, the slint runtime can use different
         | graphical foundations (OpenGL, Qt) as its own back end.
        
       | amelius wrote:
       | Does it have a HTML control?
        
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       (page generated 2022-03-26 23:01 UTC)