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Comment by ogoffart | Hacker News Reader

I'm working on a GUI toolkit that should match the requirements: Slint - https://slint.dev Can be compiled statically in a single .exe that is smaller than 40M. Has a license that allow proprietary on desktop for free. Has dark/light styles. Even comes with a (work in progress) drag and drop WYSISYG editor.

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Where did the idea come from that starting with a 40MB exe is small? That's completely outrageous. You could embed all of python, tk, fltk, wxwidgets and pyqt and still not be close to 40MB.

FLTK static binaries start at 100KB, win32 binaries can start at 1KB, Juce is about 2MB.

Using GLFW or SDL for an openGL window then using IMGUI would start at a few hundred kilobytes.

What are you doing in there that makes your binaries 100x times as big and why would this be a selling point?

Man, as a C# dev, I'd kill for a single exe output. The binary being only 40MB is an absolute fantasy.

We have a project at work, it's nothing crazy, mostly shuffling data from one pipe to another, maybe a few thousand lines of code. A true standalone build including dotnet is over 180MB. The build that relies on the system dotnet install is still over 50MB. It's not even a GUI, it's a background service.

Things on Windows have a bad habit of enormous binary bloat, I'm not sure why. I don't think the problem is near as bad on Linux in general, but I don't have enough experience with linux dev to really say

This has been solved since .NET 6/7 and the results should pleasantly surprise you:

- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/sing...

- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/trim...

Alternatively, you could try the following first (use .NET 8 SDK):

    dotnet publish -o out -p:PublishSingleFile=true -p:PublishTrimmed=true

Also, I just tried worker template (it includes generic host, DI, logger, etc.) and it's only 5 MiB when AOT compiled on macOS:

    dotnet new worker --aot
    dotnet publish -o out

Will likely take less on Windows and Linux.

You already have that as a .net dev.

I deploy my asp.net site to Linux by building it as a self contained single file. Deploy services. Have a couple of WPF apps both self contained single file.

They all end up around 43-85mb. The services are smaller when trimming is applied at around 30mb.

Not a single project has ended up over 100mb but I can see that happening if you have a ton of nuget packages.

I don't know for certain but expect it comes from comparing solutions with those based on virtual machines like Java's. The requirements in the original article look like a corporate wish list.

OP said less than 40MB. You can build Slint binaries targeting embedded devices. So a few hundred KB for a small application. Still arguably too much space but gui frameworks like slint use a domain specific language that generates more verbose code than what a human would typically write. Probably in the interests of being generic.

I've been evaluating GUI frameworks for rewriting the editor of a cross platform (Mac Windows Linux and web) game editor I maintain, and this looks worth a shot, thanks for sharing here!

I want to move away from the ancient allegro GUI we use, and so far have evaluated ImGui, RmlUi, and Qt, but so far not totally sold on anything.

> Can be compiled statically in a single .exe that is smaller than 40M.

That's... quite a high bar. Last I checked even a QML app was only like 20 MB. Why so big?

40MB was the criteria coming from the article. But it's much smaller than that. I don't have the exact number in mind. I'd say much less than 20MB.

I'm going through the documentation right now, and I'm a bit confused. How would I integrate it to use for the WInforms UI?

Thanks for the link, slint looks really interesting. As someone who's never made a GUI app would you consider it an "easy" task to make one using slink? Also I didn't see any results when searching the documentation for titlebar, is there any way to theme or change it using slink? TIA!

Wasn't it mentioned in an HN post or comment somewhat recently (like a few weeks ago)? I think I saw it then, and checked out the site and a few demos at the time.

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