Current state of native GUIs

13th November 2022 at 8:54pm
GUI

This weekend I've been researching a bit how to make a native app/GUI.

I tried ZUI, it's working but doesn't really feel native. Kha worked perfectly to cross-compile but I still needed Xcode to compile to a native app.

I tried to use HaxeUI with wxWidget as a backend but unfortunately the Hxcpp compiler seems to be buggy on my Mac M1.

TCL/TK felt native and I didn't need Xcode but the documentation was not great.

I tried Skija by using JetBrains Compose but it's still in Alpha and did not work on my machine.

Finally, GoDot was the big surprise! Wonderful experience with it, the UI makes it a lot easier to build GUIs, the development workflow is nice and quick. I will experiment more to see how far I can go with it.

Overall, I still believe that Haxe could be a viable alternative to C++/C# and the like for fast native apps, but GoDot already seems to have everything I need for now.

Related to


Backlinks: Apps made with Godot, Code as data for UI, Daily Note - 17/08/2021, Daily Note - 24/08/2021, Game Engines, Godot learning resources, The Haxe programming language, UI Libraries