There's also relm4 which builds a Elm-like paradigm on top of gtk4-rs.

An advantage of this approach is that everyone's screen readers and other accessibility tools actually work with your app.

Keeping 3 separate native front ends in sync with custom visual components means you end up building a cross-platform UI. The only apps you can build without custom components are trivial ones.

All 3 have a way of embedding webviews. In my perhaps limited experience, all desire for custom visual components are either specious or for read-only presentation views. In my opinion all controls should be native, but if you ask for a fancy data presentation I have no qualms reaching for a webview.

> perhaps limited experience

New rule: Programmers with limited UI experience (that includes myself) should abstain from weighing in on what UI designers and programmers need.

So long as the web views provide for accessibility (and thus UI automation), this sounds perfectly reasonable for the majority of applications.

Speaking of which, my dream is an "HTML light" standard with a subset of functionality specifically designed for local UI use, ideally with lightweight non-browser engines supporting this standard shipping with all major OS platforms as shared system components.

We had browsers that ran on systems with 8 MB RAM, after all, and while it's not a fair comparison, there's no technical reason why a system with three orders of magnitude more RAM should struggle to run more than a handful of applications merely because they use HTML and JavaScript for rendering.

I am building such a lightweight browser engine: https://github.com/dioxuslabs/blitz. It targets most of HTML/CSS, but leaves out (or makes optinal) a lot of the extra stuff that browsers pull in). It also has the option to use Rust instead of JavaScript for the scripting layer.

Though 8 MB RAM is a non-starter when a single RGBA texture @4k is ~30Mb and modern system often require 2 or 3 for buffering. Somewhere around the 60MB to 100MB mark seems to be the base for modern setups, at least on macOS.

rather than gtk4-rs maybe try relm4

Could you please explain why? For example: Is it colors? A je-ne-sais-quoi? Widget rounding size and fonts? Performance reasons? Keyboard shortcuts? Do you really find it's easier to maintain 3 separate frontends using an LLM than using EGUI, GPUI, QT etc?

I have seen this suggestion several times recently regarding GUI framework threads on HN in the past week (There has been a surge!), but they are always described in the way you did: With no explanation of why. I have asked at 3 times and received no answer.

Windows and Linux actually feel pretty close these days, and I don’t generally feel any friction switching between them. But when I try to use a Mac it’s another story entirely. That OS just makes no sense to me - the keyboard shortcuts all seem to be insanely bad choices, just inconsistent with huge gaps and divergences from the other OSs. It feels so stuck in the 90s

This checks out. My leading mental model to explain this mismatch is that the critique has been from people who are expecting Mac idioms, which I can't speak to.