Comment by 🦀 jeang3nie

@ostov I see. There is no overall render function in Gtk+ as it isn't an immediate mode gui, but retained mode. Each widget has it's own internal state, and you have to update whatever widgets that you wish to change. There are tradeoffs with any method of working and this way has plenty of tradeoffs.

2023-06-02 · 3 years ago

1 Later Comment

Flutter works exactly as you describe; redraws are automatic from state. It's not JS, but then JS is not "native", although I was not clear if Flutter fits what you want there either. It can compile to binary code, it's native in that sense :) ... agreed about it not looking very desktop-like, I guess that may come later as desktop support is relatively recent.

Original Post

Building native UI applications on Linux in the declarative/reactive way? — I like GTK+ visually. It's minimalistic and all applications look organically on one Gnome-based desktop. But when I decided to write an application myself for my favorite OS (Elementary), I went into a stupor. You can only write in Vala+GTK in HORRIBLE imperative style. After a long time programming in [Lisp Racket] and [JS], I can't go back to this. I can't imagine programming without lambdas and stateless...