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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2889 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 15, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Anyone have particularly strong feelings about best (or worst) UI libraries? I spent a good part of the weekend trying to take a more serious attempt at familiarizing myself with Avalonia, but I'll admit user interface work is always something I've dabbled with rather than gotten a great understanding of, and at the dabbler's level a lot of great or terrible code gets completely buried by the strength (Visual Studio) or weakness (oh boy, QT!) of IDE-focused tooling, or the difficulty of entry (ia ia OpenGL fhtagn).

I love SwiftUI. There are a few other languages that do this as well, but SwiftUI is the one I know best.

I have a lot of trouble with XML-based layout strategies- there are way too many options to actually get right (WPF/UWP/Avalonia), layouts are fiddly and require specific boxes to be checked so your elements don't launch themselves across the screen as soon as you resize the window, and you have to move out of the layout editor to actually code anything.

With these new frameworks, you can just write and call functions directly from UI code, and the code that generates the UI (and calls the other functions you've attached to buttons, etc.) is itself just a function. Spacing/stacking is automatic (compared to XAML where you have to be explicit about literally everything).

It's an absolute joy to use, or it would be if Apple's implementations of certain things weren't so buggy. There's an Ada 2.0 a Rust implementation of this idea, but the downside to that is then you'd have to use Rust.

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