Comment by joaodasilvaz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joaodasilvaz | Hacker News Reader

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Electron is a lot more feature-complete and mature, and that's what should be used for any serious projects indeed :-)

Window.js is a subset; it doesn't include the DOM nor the CSS APIs, nor a lot of web APIs.

Window.js is a tool I wish I had for exploratory 2D (and 3D) programming, without having to install multiple tools, SDKs and runtimes, and without the restrictions that web pages have when it comes to desktop applications. I wanted something like Processing but with more control, or like <canvas> but without all the browser cruft around it, and in a native window.

I think it could be a very useful tool to learn WebGL via webglfundamental.org, for example, and having something that runs on the desktop quickly.

A goal of Window.js is to eventually run Processing (p5.js), Pixi.js, Phaser and Threejs programs, as long as they don't use the DOM too much.

I am curious how you intend to get ThreeJS (or similar) working without a canvas DOM element?

Isn’t that a lot of work? Or is there an obvious way to hook it up that I’m missing?

Three.js should load and run as long as its usage of window, document, etc works as it expects. So the plan is to have a small loader that prepares the environment that Three.js expects before loading it.

This has already been done for Processing/p5.js:

https://windowjs.org/about/processing

After the initial load, all of the p5.js APIs make CanvasRendering2DContext calls, which Window.js implements natively.

Almost all of the p5.js examples work with this approach, except those that use DOM elements like buttons and sliders. Those elements could also be faked, with some patience :-)

I think it's pretty cool that p5.js scripts can run on a desktop window this way, outside of the browser!

As an aside, I also originally intended to implement an HTML renderer on something like Window.js, and make a "browser from scratch" based on it. Maybe for another day...

Neat! Will have a deeper look and see what you mean about the processing support!

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