Ask HN: Current best GUI and render window stack?

4 points by CrimsonCape ↗ HN
I'm interested in learning a new stack to accomplish my side project which is a desktop app GUI with a rendered canvas. Ideally i'd like to have a GPU-driven OpenGL rendered window integrated with either a traditional CPU-bound GUI or even better, a GPU rendered UI.

Looking around, it seems that the most advanced of UI tools peaked with WPF in terms of diversity of prebuilt controls and the complexity of those controls (think tree views, data grids, reflowing, etc), but WPF is practically abandonware at this point.

Seems like there are lots of good render surfaces out there, so maybe the actual ask is for a render surface that pairs well with an existing UI option.

I would really not like to have to design UI controls, layout logic, repainting, etc, all the low level UI tasks.

Any suggestions?

5 comments

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I would recomment javafx. My opinion is biased, but there is a high probability it will be around and supported in the next 20 years, just like java Swing.
avalonia ui, tornado FX kotlin,qt
It's been a long time I used Qt but I have good memories of the framework. It supports OpenGL(amongst others)

https://doc.qt.io

Agree. Qt has been consistently maintained and improved despite it being "old" (first released almost 30 years ago!)

In fact you're probably already using several apps built with Qt, it's still quite popular.