Cross-platform GUI toolkit

[bvisness]

The web has dominated app development for many reasons, but one big reason is that it is a very easy way to get a reliable cross-platform GUI. But cross-platform GUI really shouldn't require the full complexity of CSS and HTML.

This toolkit should:

• Render text really well. (Low-quality text ruins a UI.)
• Do (plain) text input really well. (This is an extremely common need and one that custom UI components always mess up.)
• Support accessibility tools like screen readers.
  • This means having some kind of navigable UI structure, one way or another, not just drawing rectangles.
  • At the very least, it requires structural information about the UI to be accessible to external tools.
• Make it really, really easy to put images on screen.
  • No loading and binding textures, no weird shaders, just plonk an image onto the screen.
• Make it really easy to escape from the UI and just draw stuff.
• Make it easy to fall back to non-toolkit graphics for parts of the UI. (So being able to fall back to native platform graphics APIs for chunks of your UI.)

In general: this toolkit should make simple things easy, and make complex things possible. (To paraphrase Alan Kay.)

There is plenty to be learned from traditional operating system APIs in this space. Like...go look back at Cocoa. There were so many great Cocoa apps for Mac.

[beanbrainbb]

I think Dear ImGUI and Nuklear already meet these criteria? If not, how not?

[mmozeiko]

They are good. But they are missing few important parts - the text/font rendering quality is not great there and unicode support is pretty poor (even basic RTL things) & requires full font atlas, which can be expensive for prerasterizing large amount of glyphs.

Also accessibility is not existing there.