It's a neat project. Write cross platform desktop apps in C. Presumably it would not have been very usable in practice in the late 1980s, because of all the OTHER system interfaces that still weren't portable, even if the windowing system was available in a portable way.
I can remember the subsequent period in which Java desktop apps were relatively common. They had cross platform UI by default. But the problem was:
1) cross platform GUIs are ugly by default, compared to fully native desktop apps, because they don't entirely replicate the affordances or the style of the platform;
2) in the Java case, it seemed heavyweight to install and sluggish compared to native apps;
Point 2 would not have applied to stdwin, as it would have produced small compiled binaries I suppose, but Point 1 would have.
So in the end, obviously web apps (and partly, Flash) took over the niche that "cross platform desktop apps" had once tried to fill, and then it was something of a dead zone until Electron, as far as I remember.
> cross platform GUIs are ugly by default, compared to fully native desktop apps, because they don't entirely replicate the affordances or the style of the platform;
I think this is an implementation detail. It's up to the software stack whether it leaves off before drawing the UI elements on screen, or goes ahead and takes on that responsibility too. The wxWidgets toolkit uses the runtime platform's UI, so it does not draw the widgets themselves. Java Swing took on the task of drawing the UI elements on the screen in its own style.
I just turned 65. Own 1 person custom software development company and am very much active professionally. Started programming in the 80s while working as a research scientist.
It's all relative. When I was 20, I'd consider myself old at 36. Now when I am 36, my definition of old has shifted and it's now somewhere past 50. I guess "old" for a person is just that person 10+ years older :)
It says 1988 there.
https://github.com/thomas-hori/mirror-cwi-stdwin
I can remember the subsequent period in which Java desktop apps were relatively common. They had cross platform UI by default. But the problem was:
1) cross platform GUIs are ugly by default, compared to fully native desktop apps, because they don't entirely replicate the affordances or the style of the platform;
2) in the Java case, it seemed heavyweight to install and sluggish compared to native apps;
Point 2 would not have applied to stdwin, as it would have produced small compiled binaries I suppose, but Point 1 would have.
So in the end, obviously web apps (and partly, Flash) took over the niche that "cross platform desktop apps" had once tried to fill, and then it was something of a dead zone until Electron, as far as I remember.
I think this is an implementation detail. It's up to the software stack whether it leaves off before drawing the UI elements on screen, or goes ahead and takes on that responsibility too. The wxWidgets toolkit uses the runtime platform's UI, so it does not draw the widgets themselves. Java Swing took on the task of drawing the UI elements on the screen in its own style.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tk_(software)
...which even leaked into other language ecosystems like Python:
https://docs.python.org/3/library/tkinter.html
Edit: Someone else wrote 1988 which I suppose makes sense, as the latest reference at the end is from 1988 too. So then Guido was 32 years old.
> 32 years old
As a ~20 year old this feels so weird to read. I'm still considered young in ~10 years?
You'll still feel young too! It's really weird when you get to your mid 30's and realise that all the 20-somethings view you as old
Back when I was a teenager, people in their 20s were “old farts.”
Nowadays, I look at people in their 40s, as “kids.”
Here’s my first ever engineering project (1987): https://littlegreenviper.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/TF30...
I was 25, at the time, and a fairly newly-minted EE.
I just turned 65. Own 1 person custom software development company and am very much active professionally. Started programming in the 80s while working as a research scientist.