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Comments (61)

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  nepthar
  Okay, so this is cool, but also vibecoded by someone who just does frontend. I totally support AI development, but the first commit was 4 days ago and it's entirely written by claude. The UI looks like "the style that that AI comes up with" turned into a C framework.I don't want to discourage this kind of experimentation, but I also question how much of the last 20+ years of UI and C knowledge was not used in the construction of this project. Also, do I want to build a kanban board in C? Unsure.Just take care when evaluating this for actual usage.
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  zerr
  More like custom UI components. Native would have been if you had wrapped e.g. Cocoa NSButton on macOS and Microsoft.UI.Xaml.Controls.Button on WinUI.
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  turtlebits
  We need a HN min-release-age flag for posted projects.Or some flag to ignore users that post these types of projects often.
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  piker
  C increasingly makes sense for compile times if you can have a separate Fable pass on memory safety, etc.
• brabel
  This is amazing, finally a good looking UI framework for a low level language! I will be looking at this next time I need a little UI, since it's nice when you can make an app that has a UI and it's distributed in much, much less than 1MB rather than 300MB as most Electron apps.
• apitman
  Since most of my code for work is AI-generated now, I recently started a small side project in part to continue practicing coding by hand, and decided to use C. There's something nice about using a language that's simple enough that I could write/maintain my own compiler if I really had to.I'm really curious how secure C software would be if reviewed by AI and run exclusively in a WASM runtime.
• wg0
  Looks like ShadCN. That too in C. It's really really elegant.EDIT: It's immediate mode.
• dbvn
  This is a major spillage of CUI
• saidnooneever
  this looks really sweet actually. didnt dig into the backing code yet but the examples look really nice and clean to implement a UI with. well done.
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  pearcoder
  Since AI has removed the bottleneck of writing code, so I understand why not go directly C. This could bite back sooner or later.
• kettlez
  Clearly vibecoded, but it looks really nice. The widget id generation seems pretty naive, I wonder how well it handles dynamic UIs.
• skydhash
  This looks like built by someone raised exclusively on web and touch technologies, forgetting that both are the results of constraints. The web was not meant to be a UI platforms and have poor primitives, and touch devices lack precise positioning and a physical keyboard.Take the chips and rating as an examplehttps://yappologistic.github.io/CUI/#/c/chips-and-ratingIt’s purely aesthetic as functionality (and ux) wise, chips are not different from checkbox with labels and rating is just a discrete slider.And as I thought, you can see the duplicate code for switch and checkbox here.https://github.com/yappologistic/CUI/blob/f1202e6d98cdc297f9...People do need to differentiate between UX primitives and something that just looks different.
• rafael-lua
  Can't wait for RUI, the vibecoded Rust version of this vibecoded C project.
• all2
  The acronym collision is entertaining. I now want to use CUI to mark up my CUI.
• CrzyLngPwd
  Looks lovely, but without long term support and hostory, I wouldn't touch it with someone else's long stick.
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  dvt
  So funny seeing these kinds of frameworks being vibe-coded. I can tell the author has never used the zillions of frameworks the LLM was trained on. Writing (and maintaining) this kind of code is absolute nightmare fuel. bool narrow = cui_viewport_size(ui).x < 760; cui_row(ui, .width = CUI_FILL, .height = CUI_FILL, .align = CUI_ALIGN_STRETCH) { if (!narrow) { sidebar(ui, s); cui_separator(ui); } content(ui, s, narrow); /* a menu button opens the drawer when narrow */ } cui_sheet(ui, "Menu", &s->drawer, .side = CUI_SIDE_LEFT, .size = 280) { nav(ui, s); } There's a reason QT uses XML for their layouting, there's a reason people prefer Tauri + Vue/React, there's a reason Swift uses declarative paradigms in all their UI code. It's not that you can't build good UI frameworks in low-level languages; for example, I think Go's Fyne[1] is a pleasure to use. But people actually used their brains when designing that framework, as opposed to "hey Claude build a UI framework in C, make no mistakes."[1] https://fyne.io/
• huhtenberg
  Any pre-built examples? Even if it's something like a calculator.
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  annoyingnoob
  CUI - Controlled Unclassified Information.
• MomsAVoxell
  You know what this needs now? A Lua REPL.
• zerr
  Can you please prompt your agent to generate a C++ binding?
• Luke2642
  Looks great, but node editor is janky on mobile.
• ipsum2
  I wonder how this does with embedded devices. Would be cool to get an ESP32 with smooth animations/nice UI.
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  cincinnatus
  Shame to put effort into encouraging more C code. All C code needs to be torn out by the roots. I don't care how carefully crafted it is and how many Fable passes have been done, it is inherently unsafe.