Re:Gio – write immediate-mode GUI programs in Go
by throwaway894345 on Wednesday May 26, 2021 @12:56PM
(#27293006)
Agreed. I always think I’ll one day build my own UI framework. Drawing to the screen and computing layouts is manageable, but then I think about the details: widget focus, text selection, platform keyboard shortcuts, text rendering (which encompasses things like right-to-left text rendering, ligatures, and a million other hateful complexities), etc and I realize why there are so few toolkits out there.
I do think it would be interesting to define a minimal set of user interface conventions that would forego a lot of features but would allow developers to stand a fighting chance of building a UI toolkit. If it became popular enough, users could come to understand its conventions even if they aren’t platform native (not ideal, but something has to change).
My pet peeve with most "home-grown" GUI frameworks is relatively subtle and probably hard to implement, but it's an example why developing a GUI framework (especially a platform-independent one) from scratch is hard: no subpixel rendering for text (only "classic" antialiasing). This makes these UIs look strange on a "normal-DPI" monitor (which are getting rarer these days, but I still have some and I'm not gonna throw them away anytime soon).