Sn3llius

Thank you so much for the kind words! It's always great to read messages like this.

I can't wait to hear your feedback

Nope! No premade layouts, and not a single line CSS. Give it a shot :)

Agreed! And indeed we are still considering switching Rio to a Canvas + WebGL/WebGPU. The reason we've decided against it for now is accessibility, and weird edge cases such as Copy & Pasting.

Most languages have arrays that grow automatically. I'd say C/C++ is the exception there.

When I said array, I specifically meant O(1) access, which is in contrast to linked lists, which the name "list" would seem to imply.

List access is O(1), which effectively makes them arrays :)

Rio dev here. I 100% agree with you. We aren't expecting for JS developers to flock to rio en-masse. Instead, we're targeting the many, many Python devs that have been completely left out in the web revolution and are still stuck construcing user-interfaces using tkinter and similar.

Exactly! We've seen from personal experience just how many people are currently working on AI/datascience projects and would love to create UIs for them, but just can't. That's exactly who Rio is for - people who are experts in one field, and don't want to invest hours and hours into other languages just to create interfaces for what they're working on.

Rio dev here. You're right in that all Rio components use Material Design, but there is still room for configuration. I can't post pictures here, but if you check our discord, somebody has made a full-retro website that doesn't look material-y at all.

In addition to high-level components there's also some very basic building blocks, like a humble Rectangle. By combining these in clever ways you can get more styles than you might originally expect - just like everything on the web is ultimately colored boxes.

You nailed it.

Built-in components do as much work as possible directly on the client. Any Python code however runs on the server. This makes it dead-simple to e.g. connect to your database and also gives you the full power of real CPython, not just a cut-down WASM/transpiled version.

We don't see ourselves as Python bindings for the web, but instead as a pythonic way to create apps. I understand that "span" has become a well known name amongst web developers, that's just not something most new developers understand.

Think of it like how Python has renamed a lot of things. What other languages call arrays, Python calls lists. HashTables are dicts, and so on. Python has faced a lot of resistance here from people that got used to the more technical names, but I think the popularity of the language speaks for itself. Easy to understand, meaningful names are a plus, not a downside :D

Nailed it! We use pywebview. (Rio Dev here.)

Local apps run inside of a webview. Think of it like electron but for Python. Even though this _should_ be cross platform, we've unfortunately found a lot of subtle issues with pywebview. That's why we're still considering this to be experimental.

In my experience webview works great on Windows, but struggles on Linux. For examples Videos don't play reliably when using the GTK backend.

We're looking into other ways to run a browser - my favorite would be to just find one already installed and just start it without UI - but that's some way off.

Rio Dev here. I can see where you're coming from. Seeing an experience web-dev work can be mindblowingly fast. But there's two sides to each story - there's tons of developers that are experts in their own fields but that aren't familiar with web technologies. That's where frameworks like Rio, streamlit, reflex, etc. come in.

We've been getting a lot of reactions from people being surprised how quickly they can create Rio apps after just a few hours, when previously creating UIs was always a major roadblock for them. Seeing these reactions has been extremely rewarding.

Hey, Rio dev here. Love to see us on Hackernews <3

Rio comes with its own set of debug tools, so I don't see debugging as a problem. Our components even explain their entire layouting flow, so I'd argue debugging Rio layout is much easer than CSS :P

For example, here's an excerpt of what the built-in dev-tools have to say about a button in one of my apps:

> The component was allocated a width of 104.0 by its parent MyRoot. Due to align_x being set, the Button only takes up the minimum amount of space necessary and is centered in the available space.