I built a native Windows Todo app in pure C (278 KB, no frameworks) (github.com)

Link-Time Optimisation with "-flto" might also help, depending on how the libraries were built.

What's modern about it? Also you could have used C++ instead to remove some potential issues, and those global variables...

Use std::string and std::array or std::list, some anonymous namespaces, remove all the malloc, etc. Your code would be half the size and still compile to the same assembly language without the bugs.

Very nostalgic OP, warms my heart 10/10

As others have said, doing so in pure C and linking dynamically, you can easily remain under 20 KiB, at least on Linux, but Windows should be even simpler since it ships with much more out of the box as part of the OS.

In any event, I salute the effort! You can try the linking options I mentioned at the end of my article, it should help getting the size down.

Checks out: blurry fonts in scaled dpi, no Tab support, can't Ctrl-A select text in text fields and do all the other stuff that pre-modern frameworks offered you, errors on adding a row, ...

> modern

In what way?

Btw. I like how Inno Setup used some very old Delphi 2 compiler to create exe so small it would fit without breaking the zip compliancy. I read it somewhere 10+ years ago, so not sure if this is still the case, but still. And the initial dialog was done in pure winapi.h (of course it was winapi.pas which made everything more difficult for me to learn from)

Raylib and raygui is truly incredible from my point of view. I succeeded in getting the macOS and Windows builds going on a bunch of cute little novel (not stock standard in the repo) examples in a matter of hours with AI help. I'm inspired by all I can do with this.

For ages I felt "cut off" from the world of Desktop GUI because it was so verbose, and had high friction - need a bunch of tooling, set up, and so on. And then everything was fragile. I like to work quickly, with feedback, and PoCs and results. I think in raylib I have found a method that really achieves this. For instance, check out this tiny little "text_input.c"

  #define RAYGUI_IMPLEMENTATION
  #include <raylib.h>
  #include "deps/raygui.h"

  #define WINDOW_WIDTH 800
  #define WINDOW_HEIGHT 600
  #define MAX_INPUT_CHARS 32

  int main(void) {
      InitWindow(WINDOW_WIDTH, WINDOW_HEIGHT, "Text Input Demo");
      SetTargetFPS(60);

      // Load a larger font for better text appearance
      Font font = LoadFontEx("resources/fonts/arial.ttf", 32, 0, 0);
      if (font.texture.id == 0) {
          font = GetFontDefault(); // Fallback to default font if loading fails
      }

      // Set the font for raygui controls
      GuiSetFont(font);

      // Customize raygui styles (using BGR order for hex values)
      GuiSetStyle(BUTTON, TEXT_ALIGNMENT, TEXT_ALIGN_CENTER);
      GuiSetStyle(BUTTON, BASE_COLOR_NORMAL, 0x50AF4CFF);  // Green (B=80, G=175, R=76, A=255) ‚Üí R=76, G=175, B=80
      GuiSetStyle(BUTTON, TEXT_COLOR_NORMAL, 0xFFFFFFFF);  // White text
      GuiSetStyle(BUTTON, BASE_COLOR_PRESSED, 0x6ABB66FF); // Lighter green
      GuiSetStyle(BUTTON, TEXT_COLOR_PRESSED, 0xFFFFFFFF);
      GuiSetStyle(BUTTON, BASE_COLOR_FOCUSED, 0x84C781FF); // Hover color
      GuiSetStyle(BUTTON, TEXT_COLOR_FOCUSED, 0xFFFFFFFF);
      GuiSetStyle(BUTTON, BORDER_WIDTH, 2);
      GuiSetStyle(BUTTON, BORDER_COLOR_NORMAL, 0x327D2EFF); // Dark green border

      // Adjust font size for raygui controls (optional, since font is already 32pt)
      GuiSetStyle(DEFAULT, TEXT_SIZE, 20); // Slightly smaller for button and text box to fit better
      GuiSetStyle(DEFAULT, TEXT_SPACING, 1);

      char inputText[MAX_INPUT_CHARS + 1] = "\0"; // Buffer for text input
      bool textBoxEditMode = false; // Tracks if the text box is being edited
      bool messageSubmitted = false; // Tracks if a message has been submitted
      float effectTimer = 0.0f; // Timer for the flash effect
      const float effectDuration = 0.5f; // Flash duration in seconds

      while (!WindowShouldClose()) {
          // Update effect timer
          if (effectTimer > 0) {
              effectTimer -= GetFrameTime();
          }

          BeginDrawing();
          // Set background color based on effect
          if (effectTimer > 0) {
              ClearBackground((Color){ 255, 255, 150, 255 }); // Yellow flash (RGB order)
          } else {
              ClearBackground(RAYWHITE);
          }

          // Center the text box and button
          int textBoxWidth = 200;
          int textBoxHeight = 40;
          int buttonWidth = 120;
          int buttonHeight = 40;
          int textBoxX = (WINDOW_WIDTH - textBoxWidth) / 2;
          int textBoxY = (WINDOW_HEIGHT - textBoxHeight) / 2 - 40;
          int buttonX = (WINDOW_WIDTH - buttonWidth) / 2;
          int buttonY = textBoxY + textBoxHeight + 10;

          // Draw the text box
          if (GuiTextBox((Rectangle){ (float)textBoxX, (float)textBoxY, textBoxWidth, textBoxHeight }, inputText, MAX_INPUT_CHARS, textBoxEditMode)) {
              textBoxEditMode = !textB...