Sciter Reviews and details

Social recommendations and mentions

• Show HN: Dropflow, a CSS layout engine for node or <canvas>

  > wondering if css and svg could be used as abstraction over graphics and UI libraries There's another project called Sciter that uses CSS to target native graphics libraries: https://sciter.com > I wonder how hard it was to implement css. I've heard it can be pretty complex. It was hard, but the biggest barrier is the obscurity of the knowledge. Text layout is the hardest, because working with glyphs and... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago

• Bringing Back Horizontal Rules in HTML Select Elements

  [2] https://sciter.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/select-variants.png. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago

• Immediate Mode GUI Programming

  Otherwise, if we have only retained mode as in browsers, we will need to modify the DOM heavily and create temporary elements for handles. [1] https://sciter.com. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago

• Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

  An embedded engine is also a much faster path to viable use cases. For example Sciter [1] has some degree of success despite implementing only a sane subset of the DOM API. It doesn't work well for general internet surfing, but when used as an UI library you just avoid the parts that don't work. 1: https://sciter.com/. - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago

• Rusty revenant Servo returns to render once more

  I've still never used it but I've long been curious about Sciter: https://sciter.com. - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago

• So you want to write a GUI framework (2021)

  These bullet points are exactly what I did in Sciter (https://sciter.com) - Windowing -- Tabs -- Menus -- Painting -- Animation -- Text -The compositor -Handling input -- Pointer input -- Keyboard input - Accessibility - Internationalization and localization - Cross-platform APIs - The web view - Native look and feel On top of that DOM and CSS implementations to achieve declarative UI. And JS as a languuage behind... - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago

• Servo, the parallel browser engine written in Rust

  I'm not sure if it can support all the libraries but yes it can be used to make desktop apps. Theres also Sciter. https://sciter.com/. - Source: Hacker News / 11 months ago

• A list of rendering engines that are not Blink:

  There's also https://sciter.com/ if you don't give a damn about standards. Source: 12 months ago

• Digital Audio Workstation Front End Development Struggles

  I agree web stuff is really the best way to develop UIs. Good luck making responsive stuff in C++ for example. The paradigm of HTML, CSS, and JS is extremely powerful and even allows you to use canvas, webgpu, wasm. There are multiple commercial projects that use web dev paradigm for GUIs: https://coherent-labs.com/ https://ultralig.ht/. - Source: Hacker News / 12 months ago

• RePalm

  I did UI part of it. Up until last year my Sciter ( https://sciter.com ) worked on WinCE. Dropped support after my last customer that was using WinCE decided to drop support of that OS. WinCE had pretty solid and stable core runtime and API. Graphics was limited by GDI (no antialiasing and alpha channel) but that was the only major problem. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago

• Perspective 2.0, Open Source WebAssembly-Powered BI

  Electron is going to kill the good performance gains of Perspective. Even if you have a fully beefed-up workstation, Electron is going to trigger the CPU fans. Electron is discouraged nowadays in favor of lightweight solutions like Sciter[0], Tauri[1] or even WebView2[2]. -- [0]: https://sciter.com/ [1]: https://tauri.app/ [2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago

• XUL Layout has been removed from Firefox

  It has its own HTML/CSS rendering engine that draws stuff using DirectX, Vulkan (Win/Lin) and Metal(MacOS). It is used in many (~500 mln installations) applications that are considered native. Like Norton and other antiviruses (https://sciter.com/#customers). - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago

• XUL Layout has been removed from Firefox

  Check my Sciter ( https://sciter.com ) It is embeddable HTML/CSS/JS/ UI layer by design. If you want to check how it feels in real life application then check https://notes.sciter.com/ . That's monolithic, portable executable (~7mb) that includes Sciter itself and HTML/CSS/JS/ resources of the application ( https://gitlab.com/c-smile/sciter.notes/-/tree/main/src/res ). - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago

• Tether elements to each other with CSS anchor positioning

  Popups (tooltips include) are shown as out-of-canvas elements - separate desktop windows, that's the must for desktop UI. Check this: https://terrainformatica.com/w3/sciter-tooltip.png So far these APIs appear as complete, I do not have other tooltip related requests last 5 or so years. [1] https://sciter.com. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago

• Electron Fiddle: The easiest way to get started with Electron

  Chrome engine is build for browsing the web multiple windows multiple tabs etc. If you drive with a empty truck with trailer it uses more oil than a car. Chrome is not designed for this. There are other engines like https://sciter.com that are work for single apps, but probably scale bad if they are misused as a browser. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago

• Introducing JXC: An extensible, expressive data language. It's a drop-in replacement for JSON and supports type annotations, numeric suffixes, base64 strings, and more!

  Well, I don't really need it to be CSS as I have already one in Sciter. Source: about 1 year ago

• Virtual DOM is pure overhead

  Yes and no. Having implemented virtual DOM natively in Sciter (1), here are my findings: In conventional browsers the fastest DOM population method is element.innerHTML = ... The reason is that element.innerHTML works transactionally: Lock updates -> parse and populate DOM -> verify DOM integrity -> unlock updates and update rendering tree. While any "manual" DOM population using Web DOM API methods like... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago

• Things I’ve Learned in my 20 Years as a Software Engineer

  > Can you do it 10x better/faster than other people who are also experts in that area? Different people - different areas. Like in Sciter[1] I've implemented HTML, CSS and script engines from ground up and by myself. If a task requires deep knowledge of browser internals from all sides then I think I can be of that 10x. Even among browser developers that do HTML/DOM or CSS or script engines. It is not a secret... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago

• What is the fastest, lightest weight GUI framework?

  I'm surprised no one has mentioned it but I've been using SciterJS (website) for my most recent project. I wouldn't ever claim it's the best UI framework out there, but it's lightweight and I've never felt so productive - I've rapidly developed my UI and integrated it with my native C++ far faster than I thought possible. I will note that it is far, far cheaper and has so many more features than Ultralight does. Source: over 1 year ago

• Things CSS Could Still Use Heading into 2023

  4) if content does not exceed viewport height, remove v-scrollbar and goto 1 if it has it before; The only option is to use scrollbars that do not take space: normally scrollbar appears thin semitransparent bar on top of content. And on mouse hover the real scrollbar appears , but again on top of content. Such scrollbars do not cause re-layout as you see and VW is a viewport width always. That's why... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago

• Unreal Engine HTML5 support is back

  That one is closer I think: HTML/CSS engine ( Sciter ) inside Unreal: Https://www.reddit.com/r/unrealengine/comments/htuhzw/investigating_use_of_sciter_htmlcssui_in_unreal/. Source: over 1 year ago