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So from what I understand…

Someone needs to build Qt’s successor, probably with more beginner-friendly declarative semantics (akin to HCL or Cue) and probably with syntax closest to YAML or Python (based on learning curve, beginner readability etc).

The backend will probably have to be something written in Zig (likely) or Nim (capable, less likely) and will probably have to leverage OpenGL/Metal, WebGL and WASM.

Obviously a massive undertaking, which is why I think the industry has not reached consensus that this is what needs to happen. The less ideal options we have now often gets the job done.


There is Slint (https://slint.dev/), which was a company founded by ex-Qt devs and seem to be trying to make a better alternative to Qt. The core engine is built wiht Rust, but they also provide C++ and JS bindings and also have a QML-like scripting language you can use to design UI quickly. So far I think they've solidified their revenue model by catering to embedded devices, but I haven't seen a solid usecase for desktop apps (yet...)

There are some desktop apps made with Slint. For example:

- WesAudio has a VST plugin for audio applications: https://slint.dev/success/wesaudio-daw

- LibrePCB 2.0, is migrating their code from Qt to Slint and should soon be released. https://librepcb.org/blog/2025-09-12_preview_of_next_gen_ui/

- krokiet: https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka/blob/master/krokiet/README...


QML isn’t that different anyway from what you describe

Never heard of PanGUI - glad to see its C#, will have to try it out.

They're making the initial version with C#, but they have plans to make the library language-agnostic. Rather than creating bindings, they'll write it in a subset of C# and then transpile it to C++/Jai/Zig/etc, so you can get the best language integration without the hassle of also wrangling with your build system.

>Rather than creating bindings, they'll write it in a subset of C# and then transpile it to C++/Jai/Zig/etc, so you can get the best language integration without the hassle of also wrangling with your build system.

It sounds like a clever idea.


This should be the top comment. The thing about growth of businesses overall, is that they want outsourced capacity (that’s what employees or contractors are) and that dynamic doesn’t go away because of AI, because like the comment mentioned, it’s not reliable enough in the sense that it can accept high-context vague instructions and ‘figure it out’ like an enterprise developer can.

No, they want "outsourced capacity" from contractors with domain specific expertise. Too many freelance/indie contractors on here scratching their heads as to why to can't land clients or jobs — you need domain expertise and experience, not just the ability to write code.

What did you go with?


How is Comptime different from default AOT compilation? I assume it can work with third-party libraries that AOT don’t work with yet?


It's a code generator that runs during compile time. It's a source generator that adds some generated code files to the project. So it runs way before AOT or JIT. Once AOT/JIT run, Comptime is already invisible to them, they only see the generated code from Comptime.


I believe this is like `constexpr` for C#.


.Net is better fit for this than Python for sure?


How does it compare to https://slatedb.io/ ?

Seems similar ideas, although SlateDB seems a bit more lightweight and using Parquet as primitive (even using Arrow) might mean more compute-heavy on client-side?


from slatedb faq https://slatedb.io/docs/get-started/faq/

>SlateDB is designed for key/value (KV) online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads. It is optimized for lowish-latency, high-throughput writes. It is not optimized for analytical queries that scan large amounts of columnar data. For online analytical processing (OLAP) workloads, we recommend checking out Tonbo.


License does not yet exist? Hope it’s Apache 2.


For some reason this post links to the dev branch on GitHub, if you switch to the main branch you will see the license file is indeed Apache 2.0.


Yes it's Apache 2, thanks for pointing this out, I'll be fixing this.


Something like Borgo https://borgo-lang.github.io/


Sadly, seems to be abandoned. Last commit a year ago.


Also wishing more of these tools use C# on the backend.


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