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Comment by jenadine | Hacker News Reader

There is also Slint

Well sure, there are a lot of different options. But I wanted to pick a toolkit where there were already a lot of UI components available and I would haven't to hand roll a lot of them manually.

For instance, my UI contains a node graph. Since I was using Electron I could simply use react-flow [0]. As part of my research I also implemented node graphs in both imgui and Qt and, while certainly possible, it is a lot of work to get all the interaction nuances right.

The main drawback of using Electron was having to do a lot of interop work, of course, but as long as I was mostly working on the UI side I had all the benefits of hot reloading, existing design systems to pick and choose (I ultimately picked Mantine [1]), etc.

[0] https://reactflow.dev/ [1] https://mantine.dev/

which is mainly designed for microcontrollers and doesn't support most accessibility or power-user features on desktop. For example their input fields are incredibly basic and seem to be entirely written in their high-level DSL which is foolishly ambitious.

There is accessibility using the Qt backend and I started working on accesskit integration, which should cover the rest of the backends. Yes, more work needs to be done there, but the architecture has proven that it works. Any help with accessibility is welcome, especially as I lack the experience of having to rely on accessibility features. I might miss some things that will be show-stoppers for people reliant on accessibility. Of course any help is appreciated, too ;-)

All the text handling code is done in Rust (or C++, depending on the backend you pick). Just the basic navigation between elements and such is done in our DSL. But yes, we need more widgets and more features for some of the existing ones. We are working on that...

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