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6855 :: pro/cons in using nimpy

• gour (orginal) [2020-09-24T15:08:17+02:00] view original

  Hello,

  I plan to work on multi-platform (if possible, make a light version for e.g. Android as well) desktop GUI app want to separate computational/core part into library and have UI part developed separately...By looking at Nim's GUI offering, I can say it is quite colourful. There are some options[*] which look quite interesting like NiGui and fidget, but have a feeling that none is, atm, mature enough for full-fledged application.

  So, I'm considering to simply work on library part in Nim, create bindings for 3rd party C lib etc., and then, possibly use nimpy to bridge Python with Nim (if none of the GUI options does not mature) and do UI part by using PyQt/PySide2.

  I know it's not ideal, but wonder what is the cost, iow. what would I lose of Nim's features (e.g. type-safety etc.) if going that route?

  Sincerely,
  Gour
  

  [*] I still have to explore nimqml...

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• enthus1ast (orginal) [2020-09-24T15:19:44+02:00] view original

  Imho gintro (gtk) is the most mature gui library for nim. But afaik it does not support android

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• xigoi (orginal) [2020-09-24T16:15:29+02:00] view original

  I'd say the biggest disadvantage is that your app will depend on both Python and Nim, which might not be very convenient for clients. I don't think type safety is going to be a big issue if you read the documentation of the Python libraries you're using and make small wrappers for them so that Python objects don't live long in your Nim code.

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• gour (orginal) [2020-09-25T09:00:18+02:00] view original

  You missed the gintro library

  Actually I missed to mention wxNim <https://github.com/PMunch/wxnim> and wonder why it is not listed in the official list of GUI options mentioned above...

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• gour (orginal) [2020-09-25T09:14:45+02:00] view original

  Imho gintro (gtk) is the most mature gui library for nim. But afaik it does not support android.

  There are few issues I have with gintro (gtk):

  • although I use GTK on my desktop (Xfce) and like it, I heard too many stories how GTK is not very developer friendly - many projects moved from GTK to Qt, it lacks, imho, documentation, while Qt (even wxWidgets) are better documented, there are many tutorials, books to learn it etc.
  • gintro author (Stefan) of the bindings is, according to the Github the only contributor (he also admits that learning GTK is not easy to learn)
  • deploying GTK on Win/Mac is not easy, apps do not look great and, in general, it looks as GTK devs do not care much about those alternative OS-es

  Taking all these into consideration, I believe that I'd prefer using wxWidgets bindings, but those seems not be used much. :-(

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• Stefan_Salewski (orginal) [2020-09-25T09:40:39+02:00] view original

  Yes, my personal view on GTK is very similar, see the begining of my GTK4 book:

  http://ssalewski.de/gtkprogramming.html

  We have more than a dozen GUI toolkits for Nim now, I would suggest you to start with one of them and only come back to GTK when the other toolkits are not powerful enough.

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• sdmcallister (orginal) [2020-09-25T12:06:44+02:00] view original

  I've seen IUP listed near the bottom here:

  https://nim-lang.org/docs/lib.html

  I haven't tried it but it looks interesting as well.

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• gour (orginal) [2020-09-26T06:56:52+02:00] view original

  We have more than a dozen GUI toolkits for Nim now,

  Too many, imho. :-)

  I would suggest you to start with one of them and only come back to GTK when the other toolkits are not powerful enough.

  So, you are not for the option to possibly do UI-part with some more mature wrappers (Qt, wxpython) in Python?

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• gour (orginal) [2020-09-26T07:09:40+02:00] view original

  I haven't tried it but it looks interesting as well.

  Yeah, it's interesting...however, some years ago when I was looking at IUP, I was told by one of the main developers that there are certain issues with the IUP toolkit:

  • no native support for Mac OS
  • poor UTF-8 support and localization capabilities
  • I was advised that due to GTK, IUP is not really meant for multi-platform app

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• gemath (orginal) [2020-09-26T12:09:21+02:00] view original

  [*] I still have to explore nimqml...

  That would be my favorite when it comes to multi-platform and ease-of-use. But still depends on DOtherSide v0.6, when the current version is 0.7, so I'm having trouble setting things up.

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• elcritch (orginal) [2020-09-27T01:41:08+02:00] view original

  Nimqml seems pretty solid, but qml seems to require more work than normal qt widgets. It’s also not as consistent on cross platform L&F. Still nimql or Wxwidgets library would likely be my choice. Though you could try react native via Nim. I’d be curious on that one.

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