Would it make sense for Rust to have UI primitives that are named the same as Sw...

nwallin · on Nov 11, 2019

No.

That would kinda suck for everyone who's used to wpf, qt, swing, gtk+, etc, bootstrap, whatever came before wpf, (winforms? Don't remember) etc etc. "Just copy whatever Apple does" seems like the worst possible solution for a cross platform widget naming convention out of many possible bad solutions.

Naming stuff matters a lot less, (but still sucks) but if you pick UI system and copy all its primatives, you're guaranteed to end up with a bunch of widgets that really, really suck in several native widget sets.

Ultimately, there's not a good way to do cross platform UI. It's always going to either be mediocre on all platforms, or really bad on every platform except one. At best, it will be ok for a while, and then one platform will redefine what "native" looks like and now all of the tradeoffs you've made so that it's mostly ok are just technical debt.

I don't mean to piss on anyone's parade, but cross platform UI is probably the hardest problem in software engineering. There have been a dozen or so teams of people smarter than us who have tried and failed.

If it were my job to make a cross platform UI system for rust, I'd quit and get a job where I wasn't set up to fail. If there was a gun to my head, I'd write a fairly thin wrapper around Qt. The idea being that most people already have 1-3 Qt programs they use regularly. So even though it looks like a Qt application instead of a native one they'd still be familiar with it and it wouldn't look out of place. Then I'd spend most of my time engaged in politics. Install a few developers to developed Qt whose job it is ostensibly to be good Qt developer citizens, but whose actual job is to guide the next major version of Qt (which will break stuff) into breaking as little of my stuff as possible.

The second worst (but still bad) way to make a native cross platform UI is to give up, and make a not UI but close to UI cross platform abstraction layer, and then do the half dozen abstraction layer to native UI things separately. That still sucks more than the arena football league though.

No one's ever really done this, so it definitely sucks more than I think it does. But I walked into that suggestion knowing it sucks, so I don't feel bad. I dunno man. Everything about cross platform UI sucks.

Razengan · on Nov 11, 2019

> "Just copy whatever Apple does" seems like the worst possible solution for a cross platform widget naming convention out of many possible bad solutions.

The suggestion wasn't about copying whatever Apple does.

It's that SwiftUI has the most simple syntax (that I've seen.)

    ZStack() {

        Rectangle()
            .foregroundColor(.unicornPuke)

        VStack() {
            Text("Hello")
            Text("World")
        }
    }

If you can make it nicer and more succinct than that, go for it!

But how is that the "worst possible solution?" What OS-specific bias do you see in that?

So maybe the specific constructs for specifying view modifiers and enums could be slightly different for each language, or the ()s might be []s, and maybe we could do away with the {}s.

It would just be a model for describing the UI, that a hypothetical engine backend might take and spit out OS-native widgets. For another OS, you'd plug in a different engine.