Re: New to Lua, a few big surprises and still struggling to compile/run my first experiment

[Pierre Chapuis <catwell@...>]

In addition to those, there is also Yue (https://libyue.com).

The site is pretty bland but don't let that fool you. It is basically a better Electron, written by one of its original authors.

An example application built with it (albeit with the JS bindings) is this Slack client: https://github.com/yue/wey

-- 
Pierre Chapuis

On Wed, May 30, 2018, at 12:01, Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
> Hello Avinash,
> 
> Sunday, May 6, 2018, 1:18:11 AM, you wrote:
> 
> > I was able to write a small Lua+FLTK GUI program in under 1 MB.
> > But FLTK is old & ugly(in my opinion) and I really wanted something
> > that looked native and modern.
> 
> I  investigated  a  lot of GUI librraies last years, looking for small,
> portable, nice-looking and easy to use solution, so I can give you some
> advice:
> 
> -  IUP Lua is small (500 KB to 3 MB depending on features you need) and
> developed  by Lua authors themself. It has simple Lua API. It's not as
> ugly  as  FLTK,  but  looks  pretty simple (similar to classic Windows
> programs)
> 
> -  "Dear IMGui"  is  very small (400 KB for everything + a few
> hundred KBs for Lua binding) and provides modern-looking flat view.
> It's a bit limited,  though,  in particular GridView lacks some features.
> Lua binding: https://github.com/patrickriordan/imgui_lua_bindings
> 
> -  for  a  more traditional choice, there are bindings to wxWindows (wxLua)
> and  Qt  (lqt  and  qtlua)   - they will cost you 10-20 MB and provide
> modern-looking   GUI.  You can download ZeroBraneStudio Lua IDE to see
> wxLua in action and browse the IDE sources
> 
> 
> Aside of Lua-enabled libraries, there is Sciter GUI library that provides
> a  pretty  close  emulation  of html5+css3+js  in  just  5-10  MB.  It
> provides   all  the  niceties of modern-looking html-based GUIs, There
> are   Windows   and  Mac  versions,  while  Linux  version  ATM  is  in
> alpha stage with slow development
> 
> Finally,  there  is Qt Quick which provides nice declarative language,
> modern-looking (similar to html) GUIs and costs about 30 MB. It can be
> halved  but  this  requires compiling library yourself. It can be even
> rendered remotely in browser via WebGL backend
> 
> I personally will  choose  between  the  last  two  because  they  are
> feature-complete  (unlike  ImGui),  provide  modern-looking  fluid GUI
> (unlike  IUP)  and  either  support  well-known html programming model
> (Sciter) or high-level declarative language (Qt Quick)
> 
> 
> PS:   For   curiosity,  there  is  also  Red  language,  whose  whole
> environment including compiler, libraries and GUI library is about 1 MB!
> Unfortunately,  its GUI library is limited (no GridView at all)
> and  portability  to Mac/Linux is under development. But it's the most
> compact   GUI  description  language  I've  seen  -  f.e.  the  entire
> calculator example is just about 5 lines of code!!!
> 
> -- 
> Best regards,
>  Bulat                            mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com
> 
>