How to design a platform-independent UI framework? | Hacker News

> the backend for rendering could be skia, vulkan, directx etc. It doesn't really matter, these are just ways to draw into a native window and not the backend that owns that window. > Once the hierarchy of UI widgets are built and rendered, what is left, is the interaction with the user. Without interaction they aren't UI widgets, but merely organized graphics. You are only considering the easy, portable part of a GUI. > I gave a look at other open source projects but I couldn't find any simplified one. Consider the Windows API functions that deal with the GUI: they are comprehensive (particularly with respect to handling input and events), reasonably low level and more mature than anything you can design. If you want to do more, layering something portable on top of them and on top of similar libraries for other platforms, the end product will be more complex, not simple (or naively "simplified"). I suggest Dear IMGUI and Qt as good case studies of opposite approaches: forfeiting platform specific and advanced features in order to simplify the user's job, or adding to native libraries whatever it takes to do everything well and in the same way on all platforms without reducing complexity. Test question: what do you want to do for assistive technology?