Show HN: Ultralight – Lightweight, Pure-GPU HTML UI Renderer for C++
>> We needed something in between a huge, all-in-one browser toolkit and a bare-bones HTML UI renderer that only supports a tiny subset of HTML/CSS spec.<p>>> We started over with WebKit, stripped it to the bare-minimum, then rebuilt it from scratch with an eye towards embedding.<p>This is very similar to the origin story of Flutter. [1] In the end Flutter team just abandoned the HTML based UI idea and went with their own component system. As per the podcast, the core team doesn't have any plans to bring Flutter to the desktop development. I wish they would do it, that way we can get a performant alternative to Electron.<p>[1] <a href="https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/SED625-Flutter.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2018...</a><p>Edit: Found the actual quote from the podcast:<p>>> We allowed ourselves, I think it was a week or two and we just tore Chrome apart and see how fast we could move on our benchmarks. Allowing ourselves to break compatibility to the web. The end result was we were 20 times faster on some of the benchmarks that we cared about and obviously, the end product wasn’t the web, it didn’t render all web pages, but it taught us that there was a lot of potential to do things better, faster, if we worked on something that was
beyond the web.