That's a great idea, but I tried the official website, and it seems everything is rendered using Canvas. This means you can't select or copy text, use the browser's text translation feature, open links with a middle-click, or use the Tab key to switch focus between page elements. These behaviors feel quite out of place in a browser. However, it might be a good idea for developing game interfaces, as games don't need to worry about such browser compatibility issues.
pritambarhate · 55m ago
Google is trying to build the same with Flutter.
Kudos to the CogentCore team to build and ship this! Looks like this is made by a 2 people team. That's a lot of work to pull off!
I personally wanted something like this for Go for a while! Will try it out.
miffy900 · 5h ago
> allowing you to Code Once, Run Everywhere
May I suggest that everyone just drop this whole 'develop/program it once, run it everywhere' slogan that just gets repeated endlessly when people try to promote their new platform/framework/library or whatever? I've never seen it work out that way in practice. Never. All individual platforms have their own features, unique quirks and distinct, platform specific bugs and trying to abstract over all the platform specific stuff means you end up with either low-quality, or low-feature implementation that comes close to being usable, but still never quite USEFUL.
Even the web browser, the only one that ever came close to fulfilling that promise, still requires fixing or accounting for browser-specific implementation bugs or quirks or non-standard feature additions/omissions. The closest you can get is just ignore Firefox, Safari and just target Chromium-based browsers, OR just use a subset of the latest web standards.
Considering how scrolling itself is entirely broken on the cogentcore website itself (I'm on desktop Chrome and my mousewheel and 3rd button scrolling doesn't work), it's not inspiring that they couldn't get something basic like scrolling to work. Is it not possible to just delegate scrolling behaviour to the browser?
pritambarhate · 50m ago
>> May I suggest that everyone just drop this whole 'develop/program it once, run it everywhere' slogan that just gets repeated endlessly when people try to promote their new platform/framework/library or whatever? I've never seen it work out that way in practice. Never.
Many apps that make hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and have millions of users are built on cross platform technologies. (IntelliJ IDEs for example, and many Mobile apps which use same code for iOS and Android, Cursor, VS Code, etc). People use these apps even though they are not platform native and some of them have die hard fans too.
Code once run anywhere but at massive cost to user experience. Even if I wanted to use this I couldn’t see myself adopting when the website is so bad. Feels like Flash on an underpowered ee pc.
quaintdev · 5h ago
You all are talking about mobile loading issue. I am facing issue on Desktop Firefox.
anonzzzies · 6h ago
I like new / different approaches to UI but jikes this site is not usable on mobile.
Alifatisk · 2h ago
I read the title and thought "cool", then I checked out their example. Horrible. I've found a new respect for Flutter.
kamranjon · 8h ago
Has anyone used this? I’ve always wanted to build a native UI app in go but haven’t been too thrilled with the options out there. Am scanning the go.mod to see if I can figure out how they do it (not a huge fan of the embedded browser type stuff)
super strange website, seems to be using the UI library to actually render the website itself… which made it impossible for me to copy and paste the quote I wanted to share… try long tapping on your phone to copy some text
miffy900 · 5h ago
I was able to open F12 dev tools on desktop on their website and all content is being rendered inside a <canvas> element, which explains why you can't copy and paste.
adamors · 7h ago
Scrolling is also messed up in multiple ways, on an iPhone at least.
hysan · 6h ago
Tried to look at their website and docs on my phone and the stuttering is painfully noticeable. I’ll read a bit more but that doesn’t inspire confidence.
p0w3n3d · 6h ago
I went to their website and my phone is too slow to display the page...
Kudos to the CogentCore team to build and ship this! Looks like this is made by a 2 people team. That's a lot of work to pull off!
I personally wanted something like this for Go for a while! Will try it out.
May I suggest that everyone just drop this whole 'develop/program it once, run it everywhere' slogan that just gets repeated endlessly when people try to promote their new platform/framework/library or whatever? I've never seen it work out that way in practice. Never. All individual platforms have their own features, unique quirks and distinct, platform specific bugs and trying to abstract over all the platform specific stuff means you end up with either low-quality, or low-feature implementation that comes close to being usable, but still never quite USEFUL.
Even the web browser, the only one that ever came close to fulfilling that promise, still requires fixing or accounting for browser-specific implementation bugs or quirks or non-standard feature additions/omissions. The closest you can get is just ignore Firefox, Safari and just target Chromium-based browsers, OR just use a subset of the latest web standards.
Considering how scrolling itself is entirely broken on the cogentcore website itself (I'm on desktop Chrome and my mousewheel and 3rd button scrolling doesn't work), it's not inspiring that they couldn't get something basic like scrolling to work. Is it not possible to just delegate scrolling behaviour to the browser?
Many apps that make hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and have millions of users are built on cross platform technologies. (IntelliJ IDEs for example, and many Mobile apps which use same code for iOS and Android, Cursor, VS Code, etc). People use these apps even though they are not platform native and some of them have die hard fans too.
Edit:
Found some docs here: https://www.cogentcore.org/core/render
super strange website, seems to be using the UI library to actually render the website itself… which made it impossible for me to copy and paste the quote I wanted to share… try long tapping on your phone to copy some text