I only just found out about this
@Kickstarter to open source the Sciter HTML engine - it has <48 hours to go but I think we can do it! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/c-smile/open-source-sciter-engine?ref=thanks-tweet
It would not be right to say that this is a new browser engine, but a DOM/CSS/JS alternative that’s tiny, bog-standard C, and FLOSS would be an amazing tool to explore new GUIs, OSs and embedded experiments in a form familiar to a generations of coders.
Here’s the Hacker News discussion of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24797423…
“Sciter is a very nice engine with a solid API/SDK and rock solid engineering behind it.”
@msaunders @mala I hear a lot of people terrified about some kind of implications of this, but never actually go into what they think the problem is. I think it's great, and I for one welcome our terrifying browserOS future.
@msaunders
Bingo, bingo and bingo
As soon as we discovered what #WebAassembly was about we saw the awful implications.
#DisableWebAssembly is a good start.
@msaunders @mala this is not the only alternative implementation of web-on-native either: tauri.studio
there are not that many other reliable established native UI frameworks with proper tooling tbh:
QML with QtQuick
GTK+ with Gnome-Builder
SwiftUI with Xcode
Java Spring with Android Studio
dotNet with FormBuilder
HTML+CSS only need any text editor and any browser to be viable, and truly platform-agnostic/independent
JS and WASM becoming more of a compilation target (even if from TypeScript), other languages only need DOM bindings, mostly
@mala this is pretty interesting
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24803121
i wonder what the memory footprint is and if/how it implements accessibility stuff...
@grainloom @mala my understanding is it just uses native windows apis, so it has the same accessibility characteristics of anything that does that kind of thing. I think it might even have some specific accessibility features. It's pretty solid stuff.
@mala I'm more interested in its use of lua. it's ancient history but I was turned onto scite and sciter by a college, scite is basically the sciter text control spun off into a notepad code editor, but it's lua scriptable. The deal breaker for me was that it's windows only. I'll have to double check if that's true of sciter as well.
Regarless of if that's a deal breaker for me personally, having a solid gui framework like this for windows as open source would be a boon.
@mala oh wow, this is really cool. it's too bad the campaign is so close to closing.
>runs on 460 million PC and Macs worldwide as UI engine of various applications: Norton Antivirus, Avast Antivirus, Eset Antivirus, BitDefender and many others
So why don't the companies pay for it?
this is exactly what open source is about: the community develops software for companies to profit
we need to go more the free software way and force the companies to at least pay for the development or better contribute back!
@davidak they do pay for it. it's proprietary code currently which they license. this is to pay for it to be open sourced.
Server run by the main developers of the project 
It is not focused on any particular niche interest - everyone is welcome as long as you follow our code of conduct!
It’s not browser level (yet) but it’s usable on the desktop (think electron but 4.5MB), commercially used for more than a decade, and the author is in the middle of connecting it to quickjs, Fabrice Bellard’s MIT implementation of ES2020 https://bellard.org/quickjs/