> That is also a reason why now there are Webview2 instances all over the place on Windows 11.
I can't help but feel like there is a happy median between Native UI and WebUI that we haven't quite figured out yet.
In the gaming space there is this library called RMLUI that I have used in anger quite a bit. It gives you something that is shaped a lot like HTML and CSS, but with a built-in data binding layer, and a scripting layer that supports Lua by default but gives you the flexability to roll your own language and API. It also is a much lighter dependency than Chromium and V8.
It's missing a couple of features from vanilla HTML and CSS, but also has a bunch of unique featurea that make it far more useful in other ways. For example, it doesn't have CSS background images, but image decorators are so much more useful. And don't get me started on sprite sheets and theme media queries.
I can't help but think that something similarly shaped and designed more for general desktop use would blow the doors off of electron. My workstation has 32 gigs of RAM and yet it's often a half to three quarters full mostly because of Firefox, Discord, and Visual Studio Code instead of more lightweight apps like Visual Studio 2022.....which sounds crazy when you say it out loud.
FWIW, the start menu is a React Native app. I think that’s a pretty good compromise (I think the performance criticism is solvable, they just don’t care). Too bad RN isn’t that well supported on other platforms.
Are you describing XAML?
Possibly? I was a web developer before I started delving into desktop development, so I don't really know a ton about XAML.
I used XAML a bit at an old job
The coolest part was that it was baked into the .NET Framework installed on all newer Windows versions, so I could make a useful GUI app in like 30 KB.
Those were the days... I hated that job though.
Everything I've ever heard about XAML from folks who have used it has been positive.
Seems to me like the kind of thing that was forgotten about due to being joined at the hip with Microsoft, not necessarily because it was a bad idea.
I heard that the WPF code under the hood was jank, which might be part of why MS never went forward with it. From a developer perspective it was quite nice. I started in winform and I miss UI frameworks being obvious and straight forward. I have a rant about how to darken an image using HTML + css that despairs in how unintuitable and bodge-job the solution ends up being. WPF and WinForm were not like that, you draw what someone sees, inline, as they see it and that's quite nice.
I dislike some superficial things about it (and some less superficial things about WPF), but a lot of the ideas around how properties are set are pretty cool to me!
Also how (IIRC) it’s compiled to pretty standard .NET view code (“partial”) you could extend in other parts of the app.
I’m still happy to have left it behind for the aforementioned, ecosystem & tooling reasons.
RMLUI looks neat! closest I've seen to an open source sciter alternative.