Hi, i'm wondering if Kotlin Native will provide ui toolkit that could be used in Linux/Windows/OSX e...

# kotlin-native

[felislynx]

Hi, i'm wondering if Kotlin Native will provide ui toolkit that could be used in Linux/Windows/OSX environment. Android and iOS have good ui frameworks and it is easy to make ui. I know, that there is JavaFX/TornadoFX but to be honest, it still looks like it was taken from 1996 and layout managers are poor compared to ConstraintLayout.

[gildor]

Probably #compose is the only possible candidate for this in future (at least for now)

[oleksandr.stepanov]

Did you tried this lib?
https://github.com/msink/kotlin-libui

[felislynx]

@oleksandr.stepanov It is very similar to TornadoFX. I'm looking for something more... modern.

[gildor]

What is modern for you? Funny, but JavaFX is actually younger than Android and iOS

[gildor]

Also if you don't like JavaFX only because of layout it would be hard to find anything, especially 8f you target or major desktops.
JavaFX has AnchorPane which is kinda similar to constraints layout

[felislynx]

JavaFX didn't came from Swing shadow. I've made few applications in JavaFX but the feeling of implementing ui is so unpleasant. Overall downside for me of JavaFX is that making whole UI structure and make it look good and responsive takes a lot of time. Probably when someone is using FX a lot more, it would be faster. But business will choose Electron over FX apps. It looks better, it's faster to implement. That's why i've been asking for something that would be as fast and as easy to implement like Android/iOS layouts. In My opinion FX and Web are deep in the 90's and don't want to change. And many people adjusted to that. It is nothing wrong, but coming from other platform is high level entry of frustration, how stubborn it is to make good UI

[gildor]

coming from other platform

Other platforms is Android and iOS?
I think it’s not really good comparasion. Both Android and iOS support only 1 OS, but you want to do something for Linux/Windows/OSX, which is much more difficult

[gildor]

I agree, Electron or any other web technology is mush faster in development than native app, has own problems, but this is the reason why many modern desktop apps use it

[gildor]

Cross platform ui toolkits are very rare, there is Qt, but it’s huge technology, javafx, some smaller libraries like libui

[felislynx]

I agree with you that desktop cross platform is very difficult. If no ui toolkit is predicted for kn then no problems, hoping that in future it will.

[felislynx]

Maybe wrapping native (per platform) tookits in one common interface would be a nice idea. As far as i know, osx have quite nice toolkit. I don't remember if UWP is still in the game but it was quite nice. Don't know how about linux.

[gildor]

osx have quite nice toolkit

But you cannot use it for other OS

[gildor]

Writing wrapprs for native framework is big project, also you always get only subset of features of every UI