CUI – Native UI components for C

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.

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.

I click around on mobile nothing happens, vibe coded trash. I’d spend 10 minutes comparing it to Clay but it’s not worth it I already know the result. The problem with this kind of projects is they expire very soon, the least the effort the least the value

We need a HN min-release-age flag for posted projects.

Or some flag to ignore users that post these types of projects often.

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.

C increasingly makes sense for compile times if you can have a separate Fable pass on memory safety, etc.

I’ve also spent the last couple of weeks vibe coding a component-based UI framework for C. My target is embedded hardware with 2 * 300mhz ARM 32 CPU, and a Nintendo 3DS like OpenGL ES 1.1 GPU from DMP: Fujifilm cameras from 2013-2016 like the X70, X-E2, X-T1, X100T. It’s a bit faster than iPhone 2007 on CPU side, and slower on the GPU side due to needing to copy from GPU back to main memory for scan-out. It’s funny how these things seem to come up and then everyone’s doing it.

I didn’t see the code here because I couldn’t find an easy link to its Github. My UI framework i’m calling FocalUI. We do layout and basic geometry with a fork Clay where we added “layer” and “focusable” markers to Clay elements. Instead of drawing immediate mode, we store a list of draw commands and layer geometry in a CoreAnimation-like tree. The renderer composits the layer tree and renders to OpenGL, and we use damage tracking to copy just the changed pixels from the GPU back to the camera’s framebuffer for scan-out.

It’s been a huge effort to add touch inertial scrolling, spring animation, navigation effects etc at 55hz to this device that before only did d-pad nav at 25 Hz, but things are starting to shape up for a release this week :)

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.

Looks like ShadCN. That too in C. It's really really elegant.

EDIT: It's immediate mode.

This is a major spillage of CUI

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.

Clearly vibecoded, but it looks really nice. The widget id generation seems pretty naive, I wonder how well it handles dynamic UIs.

Design is essentially a clone of egui in C.

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 example

https://yappologistic.github.io/CUI/#/c/chips-and-rating

It’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.

Can't wait for RUI, the vibecoded Rust version of this vibecoded C project.

One of the most hideously ugly C codebases I’ve ever laid my eyes on. I don’t even care if it’s bug free. What value does this add to the programming community? A “library” generated by a morally bankrupt megacorporation’s plagiarism machine. Good job learning nothing, contributing nothing except another shadcn looking UI shitkit, and further training the beast that will eat you alive one day. I will now use this opportunity to promote Clay (not mine obviously), which is absolutely loaded with heart and soul, and is a beautiful piece of engineering: https://www.nicbarker.com/clay

The acronym collision is entertaining. I now want to use CUI to mark up my CUI.

Looks lovely, but without long term support and hostory, I wouldn't touch it with someone else's long stick.

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/

Since AI has removed the bottleneck of writing code, so I understand why not go directly C. This could bite back sooner or later.

Can you please prompt your agent to generate a C++ binding?

You know what this needs now? A Lua REPL.

Any pre-built examples? Even if it's something like a calculator.

CUI - Controlled Unclassified Information.

    $ tree lab
    lab
    ├── BUI
    ├── CUI
    ├── GPUI
    └── TUI

Looks great, but node editor is janky on mobile.

I wonder how this does with embedded devices. Would be cool to get an ESP32 with smooth animations/nice UI.

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.