Agent UIs are all markdown, HTML, big scrolling lists, text flow, unicode chars, and all the other stuff that C++ frameworks are terrible at, but which is a doddle in HTML/CSS/JS.. You are a brave man!
This is very interesting. I know that coding string-related stuff with C/C++ can be incredibly tedious and error prone (even hard security-wise). But all the stuff in the web-related stacks/libraries in other languages, is either already somehow being transcompiled to C to execute, or could be relatively easily ported/reused by directing an LLM/agent to do it
Do you think that could work to make C/C++ better at this? What things would you import/copy from elsewhere?
The hard bit is when you have complex, responsive layouts involving text. (And styling it)
Something seemingly trivial like an agent-style chat containing markdown text blocks, where it's expandable and smoothly scrollable is insanely difficult. The only frameworks that do this well are browsers, and the amount of horrible, horrible logic hidden inside them to make it look easy is hard to believe.
And since in many agents you're also going to want to display actual HTML, unless you're going to embed a browser engine in your C++ library, that's just not doable.
> And since in many agents you're also going to want to display actual HTML, unless you're going to embed a browser engine in your C++ library, that's just not doable.
I guess this is the main issue. Either you end up reimplementing a browser (which will def have a ton of issues), or you embed a browser and you end up with bloat anyway