IUP Portable User Interface: Multi-Platform Toolkit for Building GUI in C or Lua | Hacker News Reader

IUP Portable User Interface: Multi-Platform Toolkit for Building GUI in C or Lua

webserver2.tecgraf.puc-rio.br

61 pointsvmorgulis16 comments

Using this library and others, there's a neat trick to make Lua GUI programs that fit in a single executable file without dependencies. Of course, the traditional "brute force" way of doing this is to make a self-extracting archive. But the classier way is to use srlua:

http://webserver2.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/lua/#srlua

Basically, it's a slightly modified Lua interpreter, which you literally concatenate with your script. When run, the interpreter tries to run the script that's appended. Although the srlua documentation was pretty vague on the subject, I've successfully linked it statically with this IUP library, so the appended script can load it and display a nice GUI. Maybe not always the optimal way of distributing programs, but I thought it was cool (you could even make an executable that allows you to graphically edit its own Lua source, though you might have to work around the fact that a running file isn't writable on some platforms).

You may be interested in a tool I wrote that builds standalone executables: https://github.com/ers35/luastatic

For the following program:

  iup.Message('test', 'hello world')

Build the program to a standalone executable:

  luastatic example.lua /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/liblua5.2.a -I/usr/include/lua5.2 libiup.a libiuplua52.a libiupcontrols.a `pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk+-3.0` -lX11

This is cool, because it has quite a few more controls available than something similarly licensed and minimal (like libui).

One thing, though. What about Mac OS support?

edit: a page mentions Mac OS support via GTK and Quartz, as well as GTK and X11. (http://webserver2.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/iup/en/drv/gtk.html) But I guess this isn't nearly as well-supported.

Eric Wing is sort of working on it. https://sourceforge.net/p/iup/mailman/message/34307825/ https://github.com/ewmailing/IupCocoa/tree/Cocoa

I saw binaries for Snow Leopard and it appears to be built on Fink. So I think you're required to set that up too.

IUP is not a huge system like Qt/GTK+/wxWidgets and the code for GUIs is relatively concise. I think this lends to a perception that IUP is just a simple system for simple applications. Actually, it is focused on engineering applications, with some powerful widgets for data entry and visualization.

The development team is small but very active and responsive. Windows is well supported along with various flavors of Unix. IUP doesn't seem to get much use on Linux. I think IUP doesn't insulate you from the platform as much as Qt does, so cross-platform work takes a bit more care. Not all the features available on Windows will be supported on GTK/Motif.

Even if the only target is Windows, IUP may be worth considering for the clean code, convenient layout management, and the data-oriented widgets.

> It offers a simple API in three basic languages: C, Lua and LED

I haven't been able to find any reference to LED as a language, anyone have a link? Just curious.

I think it was a language they developed to be used with IUP. Original research paper: http://webserver2.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/iup/download/spe95.pdf Under "Resources->LED" on the site there is some more information: http://webserver2.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/iup/en/led.html

Check the site. There's a nice example there. It is basically a script-like way of building interfaces. The cool thing is that it is loaded as a resource, so you can edit the LED script after compiling, and as long as you haven't changed any of the identifier names, you can modify the GUI.

I am going to try that this week. Sounds like a nice compromise between the newer 'Immediate-Mode GUIs' and the standard event-based one. I can see it as a way to let the user skin your app within your control of how much they can modify.

IUP is great, but there is very little tutorial information. You have to learn from the reference and source examples. For LED, just look at the listings alongside the C and Lua. It's a simple language to figure out.

Although LED allows GUI modification without recompilation, it seems hardly anyone uses it. IUP is so well designed that GUIs in Lua or C are quite simple to hand code. A C version will be more verbose than Lua, but if I'm writing a logic in C, I find it more convenient to stick with C for the GUI.

Well that was unexpected, a N800.

http://webserver2.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/iup/en/screenshots/n800...

Sadly these days i feel mixed emotions, and i keep finding that Linux desktop development seems to have gone off the rails thanks to that thing.

> Linux desktop development seems to have gone off the rails thanks to that thing.

It started earlier. KDE3 used to be great and very Windows-like desktop experience on Linux/*BSD. Then they choose to rewrite KDE and make it more like OSX, the illfated KDE4 and its slow XML KBus trainwreck followed and burned the KDE platform. Many users switched to Gnome 2 which barely got useable with less features than other desktop platforms. Then the whole Tizen (Intel, Nokia, Samsung, ...) debacle with multiple UI frameworks competiting instead of focusing the resources. The whole thing is dead, beside Bada/Tizen is used in Samsung SmartTVs and SmartWatches and waiting in sleep-mode as backup strategy in case Google changes direction with Android. Then Gnome changed direction and rewrote Gnome with Gnome 3. Many users now switched to distributions that forked Gnome 2 like Mint or replaced it with a Gnome 2 like experience (Ubuntu).

What a sad desktop experience there is nowadays. For desktop experience I favor Windows 7 UI theme or Windows 2000 classic UI, or previously KDE3 (is there a up-to-date fork?). macOS and Ubuntu are okay too. For touch Android 5+ and iOS 6 have the best UI in my opinion.

Sadly many have lost their way and alinated their userbase with illfated design decisions (Win8/10, WinPhone7/8/10, KDE4, Gnome3, Tizen). I am looking forward to the new OS from Google, called Magenta/Fuchsia.

And nowadays the browser is like a second OS and Chrome with its simple UI is great. I dislikevthe weird round tbs in Firefox. IE11 was fine too, but MS lost its way. The Win10Store and XBoxOne are failing and have comparable little marketshare - several former exclusive titles now get released for Win7+ and on Steam as well - good that people aren't dumb, and MS evil strategies failed. Now they need a new CEO who axes and fires the people responsible for the last 5 years. Create a Windows 11 without privacy issues and a nice UI that can changed to look like Win classic and 7.

KDE3 fork: https://www.trinitydesktop.org/

Gotta say i love the old KDE3 tarball organization.

Once you have Qt and some other dependencies in place you build it up layer by layer.

present day KDE seems to have taken a page from Gnome, and now is a sprawling mess of tarballs.

The closest i have come to KDE3 on the GTK side is XFCE.

Similarly, while i understand that breaking things down to multiple tarballs have made developer life easier over at Xorg, building it requires compiling a pile of small tarballs.

> Similarly, while i understand that breaking things down to multiple tarballs have made developer life easier over at Xorg, building it requires compiling a pile of small tarballs.

I wonder if Xenocara works on anything other than OpenBSD...

I sympathize with your sentiment. Trying to maintain packages even for something as small as Xfce has been a nightmare (with all the Xfce-goodies, at least). I can't imagine what it would take to maintain so many packages needed for KDE and Xorg these days.

While "modular" sounds nice in theory, in practice you wind up wanting most of the modules anyway, so the modularity just becomes a pain in the ass. At the very least, some sort of "mega module(s)" would be nice: one could provide everything, one could perhaps provide a "20% of the code for 80% use cases" type of subset, perhaps there could be various customizations for special purpose applications, etc...

I first used it with CHICKEN Scheme. There's a distro that includes IUP and the Canvas egg for Windows. Eggs are the containers for CHICKEN Scheme packages.

Great for quick, and not too bad looking, GUIs from C or CHICKEN. I haven't tried Lua or the LED mentioned.

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