Comment by solarkraft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by solarkraft | Hacker News Reader

A few questions

- What does it do to be better (smaller, more memory-efficient) than a browser engine? Which features does one lose?

- When will Linux support ship? (Edit: I see it's planned, this was just an assumption before)

- There could be bindings to other languages in the future, right? (Edit: I see .NET compatibility is planned)

Edit: - Where's the source? Yes, this is a rethorical question; What is the motivation to keep it closed? This will probably hinder adoption (unless support is damn good).

- Could you upload the files to GitHub (or some other, similar place)? It's probably less intimidating than "Get SDK" and a lot nicer to browse through samples on my phone (Chrome doesn't seem to forward zips to apps at all, I don't really have a good text/code viewer installed etc).

Hi there:

Pros (Ultralight is...)

- Smaller distributable (25% the size of Electron/CEF or smaller).

- Simpler and easier to build (fewer dependencies and smaller codebase).

- More configurable (users can do custom handling of file system, fonts, GPU rendering, clipboard, and more).

- Potentially more performant (all rendering is done via GPU command buffers).

- First-class support from an actual company.

Cons:

- No support for MathML, Geolocation, WebGL, IndexedDB, WebAudio/Video (for now)

- Less mature and unstable.

- Slower release cycle (might be a pro).

Linux support is planned and will ship when it's ready, you can track its progress here: [1]

Yes, we have plans to publish a C API interface to simplify bindings for other languages.

The WebCore source is available here [2]. The rest of the source is kept closed for now to keep our licensing/support options open. There's a chance we will find a better funding model and will open-source the entire repo in the future.

Yes, I agree the SDK packages should belong on GitHub, and will also be BSD'ing the framework/sample code so users can fork and hack on it at will.

- [1]: https://github.com/ultralight-ux/ultralight/issues/4

- [2]: https://github.com/ultralight-ux/ultralight-webcore

Slower release cycle is a con.

Slower deprecation cycle is a pro.

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