Okay, so this is cool, but also vibecoded by someone who just does frontend. I totally support AI development, but the first commit was 4 days ago and it's entirely written by claude. The UI looks like "the style that that AI comes up with" turned into a C framework.
I don't want to discourage this kind of experimentation, but I also question how much of the last 20+ years of UI and C knowledge was not used in the construction of this project. Also, do I want to build a kanban board in C? Unsure.
Just take care when evaluating this for actual usage.
The thing with these kind of projects is that... What value do they really bring to the table? Because if it's so easy to come up with something like this (and arguably easier over time), then if I need a UI toolkit and components for my app, I can just prompt them right away to obtain something like this with minimal effort. Plus, adapted to my needs, my code, my platforms and language. UI/UX done right is still a dance between design and engineering. But I'm not sure these libraries do solve anything meaningful today that is worth the abstraction and dependency.
Since most of my code for work is AI-generated now, I recently started a small side project in part to continue practicing coding by hand, and decided to use C. There's something nice about using a language that's simple enough that I could write/maintain my own compiler if I really had to.
I'm really curious how secure C software would be if reviewed by AI and run exclusively in a WASM runtime.
This is amazing, finally a good looking UI framework for a low level language! I will be looking at this next time I need a little UI, since it's nice when you can make an app that has a UI and it's distributed in much, much less than 1MB rather than 300MB as most Electron apps.
There are some libraries that use native widgets on each platform, e.g. libui-ng. Although the issue with things like this is that you aren't going to be able to use all of AppKit, and you get forced into the lowest common denominator expressable by all platforms.
A good middle ground might be having platform-specific pieces but expressed using a more standard domain-specific language. E.g. technically you can already wire up GUIs without interface builder but it's quite verbose. There should be some simpler way to express layout constraints and have button callbacks.
Native is one of those words that means different things depending on context and your background. For me, native means actual binary code running on the machine, not through a JVM or V8 or anything of the sort.
In the Apple world, Native usually means using the system UI components and the Apple guidelines.
Not the best title. It is not "for C", but in C. And currently useable on desktop + web but after looking at the project I think it will quickly be ported on mobile etc.
Yes, and? As the cost of code generation approaches zero, this starts to make more sense, especially if you do have mechanisms in place to ensure safety and correctness.
I did an experiment a couple weeks ago of having Opus 5.5 translate an MP3 decoder from Rust into Cortex-M33 assembly language, both raw asm and symbolasm. The code was 3x smaller and ~1.5x faster than Rust -O3. These seem like gains that are worth it.
Yes that makes sense, but if you're iterating on software then I think C will generally win due to its ability to compile cross-platform until you want to build a "release" which you could do by having Fable translate it to ASM at that point.
Did you have it go directly to asm or emit the assembly from the Rust toolchain and then contract that? For small stuff, I have been having it write directly, or larger pieces I am having better results via contractions.
I should add, part of the experiment was to test whether having variable names and (C style) types would help the LLM. For a task of this size (about 1.5 kLoC Rust, 3k insn asm) it was inconclusive, but for larger projects I suspect it would make a difference.
And the plan for symbolasm is to move past C style types into Rust style and maybe dependent typing, specifically to facilitate automated proofs.
I'm observing the opposite phenomenon. I recently vibecoded (with supervision) a 25k-line Rust codebase that takes 15 seconds for every build. If I were writing that by hand, a 15-second build time would drive me crazy and I would stop working until I could find a good way to speed it up. With vibecoding it barely matters, because the interval between builds is much longer and the agent (Opus 5.5) spends most of its time thinking or running tests. Unlike me, the agent rarely makes the kind of trivial mistakes that require rebuilding multiple times in a row.
This looks like built by someone raised exclusively on web and touch technologies, forgetting that both are the results of constraints. The web was not meant to be a UI platforms and have poor primitives, and touch devices lack precise positioning and a physical keyboard.
So funny seeing these kinds of frameworks being vibe-coded. I can tell the author has never used the zillions of frameworks the LLM was trained on. Writing (and maintaining) this kind of code is absolute nightmare fuel.
There's a reason QT uses XML for their layouting, there's a reason people prefer Tauri + Vue/React, there's a reason Swift uses declarative paradigms in all their UI code. It's not that you can't build good UI frameworks in low-level languages; for example, I think Go's Fyne[1] is a pleasure to use. But people actually used their brains when designing that framework, as opposed to "hey Claude build a UI framework in C, make no mistakes."
That looks pretty readable to me. Somewhat noisier than SwiftUI due to all the repeated "cui_", but not much. I've seen far worse.
I would be more concerned about the opposite problem: the fact that it's apparently reactive and thus inherits the same performance pitfalls as every other reactive UI framework. Retained-mode UI is much uglier (at least if you build the UI in code) but doesn't have these issues.
edit: actually it's worse than reactive, it's full immediate-mode render-everything-every-frame.
The use of C, in that case, was likely made for performance reasons and avoiding dependencies.
The author added dozens of complex widgets in a few days, AI driven of course. The intended audience is not manual coders, you would show some examples to the clankers and ask for you UI and custom widgets.
Shame to put effort into encouraging more C code. All C code needs to be torn out by the roots. I don't care how carefully crafted it is and how many Fable passes have been done, it is inherently unsafe.
I don't want to discourage this kind of experimentation, but I also question how much of the last 20+ years of UI and C knowledge was not used in the construction of this project. Also, do I want to build a kanban board in C? Unsure.
Just take care when evaluating this for actual usage.
I'm really curious how secure C software would be if reviewed by AI and run exclusively in a WASM runtime.
A good middle ground might be having platform-specific pieces but expressed using a more standard domain-specific language. E.g. technically you can already wire up GUIs without interface builder but it's quite verbose. There should be some simpler way to express layout constraints and have button callbacks.
In the Apple world, Native usually means using the system UI components and the Apple guidelines.
Wouldn't "native ... for C" be redundant?
I did an experiment a couple weeks ago of having Opus 5.5 translate an MP3 decoder from Rust into Cortex-M33 assembly language, both raw asm and symbolasm. The code was 3x smaller and ~1.5x faster than Rust -O3. These seem like gains that are worth it.
I should add, part of the experiment was to test whether having variable names and (C style) types would help the LLM. For a task of this size (about 1.5 kLoC Rust, 3k insn asm) it was inconclusive, but for larger projects I suspect it would make a difference.
And the plan for symbolasm is to move past C style types into Rust style and maybe dependent typing, specifically to facilitate automated proofs.
The tools have gotten fancier, for sure, though.
For larger codebases, things might be different.
Or some flag to ignore users that post these types of projects often.
EDIT: It's immediate mode.
Take the chips and rating as an example
https://yappologistic.github.io/CUI/#/c/chips-and-rating
It’s purely aesthetic as functionality (and ux) wise, chips are not different from checkbox with labels and rating is just a discrete slider.
And as I thought, you can see the duplicate code for switch and checkbox here.
https://github.com/yappologistic/CUI/blob/f1202e6d98cdc297f9...
People do need to differentiate between UX primitives and something that just looks different.
[1] https://fyne.io/
I would be more concerned about the opposite problem: the fact that it's apparently reactive and thus inherits the same performance pitfalls as every other reactive UI framework. Retained-mode UI is much uglier (at least if you build the UI in code) but doesn't have these issues.
edit: actually it's worse than reactive, it's full immediate-mode render-everything-every-frame.
The use of C, in that case, was likely made for performance reasons and avoiding dependencies.
The author added dozens of complex widgets in a few days, AI driven of course. The intended audience is not manual coders, you would show some examples to the clankers and ask for you UI and custom widgets.
Well, fewer problems!