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Comment by kjksf | Hacker News Reader

The "not good enough for complex apps" is bull.

I ported GPUI to C++ and I wrote file manager in it.

It's as complex a desktop app as you can get: docking system, tabs, lists, trees, dialogs.

I don't know what the author alludes to as an app that would be too complex for GPUI.

I also know win32 programming and QT and GPUI is more capable and faster than either. I mean win32 is a tragedy but QT is decades of work and doesn't offer anything that GPUI lacks.

Like I said: bull. You can write any desktop app you can imagine in GPUI.

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> It's as complex a desktop app as you can get

Unlikely if you stay at this high a level. Like, how many "widgets" does your tab have? A single uneditable label and a close cross button? Can it signal a dirty state? A progress bar for a move operation to that tab? Another bar for a copy operation from that tab? Another tab for the second copy operation? Can it signal a locked state, link state with another tab, custom label, some file stats on hover?

Similarly for the list, can you highlight data (color/bold) in a box of rows 1-5 cols 4-5 + another box elsewhere?

Do you have a "heatmap" size view as an extra panel with hundreds of extra boxes and labels etc? Etc. etc.

> GPUI is more capable and faster than either

Do you have a reference benchmark table for various operations?

According to the benchmarks posted there, it's like extreme edge cases involving ton of changes in the UI that I'm not sure which app in the real world really does that. And if they do, there are many other optimization techniques you can use in pretty much any of those GUI libraries.

There are two camps to define complexity, as far as I can tell: one involves dynamic updates to plenty of elements in the current "view" (where view is not necessarily what's in the viewport, but what is in the rendering tree of the current process), and the other one has to do with intricate visual eye candy stuff such as stutter-free, orchestrated modern animations and effects that could involve custom shaders. The article is talking about the first one. Personally, what defines a choice of UI library has to do more with the second camp, plus how stable it is, extensible, and if it works as intended in the platforms I want to ship the app.

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