6 ms·

SixtyFPS Becomes Slint

92 points by tronical 5y ago

the_gipsy 5y ago
In the kitchensink demo, the keyboard doesn't show when clicking the input, on mobile.
zokier 5y ago
The biggest problem to me with the old SixtyFPS brand was that it was always just aspirational thing and not really describing any property of the framework. As such it oversold the product and muddled the message as it was easy to point out that it in fact did not always hit 60fps. So while Slint as a brand might be less ambitious, at least it feels bit more honest
boondaburrah 5y ago
The requirements state "If you're using C++, a compiler that supports C++ 20" and All I'm thinkin' is it must be nice to be able to choose a modern compiler like that. Some of us are lucky to get C++14. I'm not saying we should be stuck on old compilers forever, but in C++ land, especially when I have to integrate with other frameworks or game engines, the assumption that I can choose my compiler or will always be on latest kinda irks me. Even Qt has versions for the last few MSVC releases (though thankfully the ABI stopped changing every release after VS2015). That being said, this still looks pretty new, and by the time it's a mature framework C++20 itself may be more available.
- s9w 5y ago
- milliams 5y ago
  I think that's a deliberate decision. They know that by the time it gains adoption even C++20 will be "old". By pinning the requirement high now, while there will mostly be early-adopters, startups, open source projects etc there's less of a cost.
- pornel 5y ago
  On the Rust side they require a compiler released 10 weeks ago, and it is actually reasonable, thanks to Rust's strong backwards compatibility and painless auto-update.
  - boondaburrah 5y ago
    Yeah the problem isn't nearly as pronounced for rust, since rustup exists and rust itself isn't really available on any platforms you can't just update the toolchain yourself. C++ has a lot more tangled dependencies going on especially when you're stuck with a vendor's compiler. Make no mistake: the problem here isn't necessarily technological.
    - jcelerier 5y ago
      I don't understand what would be an environment where you could fetch the latest rust from internet but not the latest clang. I do my builds on centos:8 (well, rockylinux now) and it has access to the latest GCC 11. On Debian derivatives llvm itself provides up to date repos and on Windows, llvm-mingw works perfectly.
      - boondaburrah 5y ago
        Generally, an environment where you can't use clang /at all/. There are many C++ compilers.
        jcelerier 5y ago
        but this does not make sense. If you can't even change the C++ compiler you use you can't write non-C++ code (e.g. Rust) either. Otherwise let me just fork Clang into the "Gnalc" compiler for the "Sulpsulpees" language which happens to be exactly compatible with the programming language that the clang++-13 binary supports. Takes me a whole 15 minutes, most of which will be taken by forking the LLVM repo on github, and I can guarantee than porting to it will be less effort than porting to Rust. I can even provide the backing of a proper non-profit foundation established on two continents for your legal team's needs.
- ahartmetz 5y ago
  It's usually very old projects that are stuck with old C++ versions, no? I mostly work in embedded, and even there, new GCC or Clang versions are rarely hard to pull in.
beepbooptheory 5y ago
Any other frameworks that name overlap with a band?
- alophawen 5y ago
  To name a few: SDL: https://www.discogs.com/artist/707518-SDL https://www.discogs.com/artist/707518-SDL DirectX: https://www.discogs.com/artist/4506329-Direct-X-2 https://www.discogs.com/artist/4506329-Direct-X-2 Vulkan: https://www.discogs.com/artist/1464296-Vulk%C3%A1n https://www.discogs.com/artist/1464296-Vulk%C3%A1n
  - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
    the "Direct X" one looks like an artist picking a "high-tech" name from a software framework. Slint is the other way around, if anything.
- benplumley 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_(band) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_(band)
whylo 5y ago
Hopefully this starts supporting accessibility tools before it gets too much traction and people start shipping inaccessible apps. The WebAssembley output demos on the homepage just render to a <canvas> and are completely inaccessible with any of the usual tools (screen reader, keyboard-only, voice dictation etc) but there's a GitHub issue (https://github.com/slint-ui/slint/issues/32 https://github.com/slint-ui/slint/issues/32) so fingers crossed.
- robin_reala 5y ago
  Yeah, a UI toolkit that doesn’t have even basic accessibility bindings is basically illegal to use for commercial products in multiple major countries now. No specific shame on Slint (everyone has their own roadmaps) but when even big companies are failing* in this way it does seem like we’ve got a long way to go as an industry. * Flutter has no accessibility bindings on the web and therefore falls under the same “illegal” category.
  - nindalf 5y ago
    I’m surprised by how much progress we’ve made in this area. I used to make android apps circa 2013-15. Accessibility was an afterthought, a nice to have. Reading the SwiftUI docs in 2022, it’s front and centre. They tutorial covers accessibility soon after “hello world”. Every module of the tutorial has a section on setting the right accessibility info, rather than a single, optional accessibility tutorial. It makes me happy that doing the right thing is the default. I’m planning on making a small productivity app just for myself, but it’ll be 100% accessible simply because they’ve made it so easy.
    - paxswill 5y ago
      Integrating accessibility into the tutorial is fantastic, but I’d also attribute it to Apple emphasizing accessibility in their developer documentation for a long time. I remember one of the early Interface Builder tutorials explaining accessibility pretty early on.
    - mirashii 5y ago
ComodoHacker 5y ago
Slint sounds to me like a linter for Swift or something like that. A variation on "slick" would be better IMO.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
  I loved their 1991 album, "Spiderland" https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/may/01/spiderland-slint-album-reinvented-rock https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/may/01/spiderland-sli...
  - jfb 5y ago
    It's a classic.
milesvp 5y ago
The need to rebrand is unfortunate. High framerate is not nearly as important as low standard deviation in the framerate. Naughty dog has blogged on the topic, but it was well known decades earlier in the demo scene. Getting smooth animations on old hardware was not trivial, but people discovered that the way the brain and eye work in conjunction, you could create marquees that looked flawlessly smooth at 8 fps provided you always redrew the pixels with very precise timing. I’ve sort of known this for a while, but I got to see a demo a few years ago. A friend set up an old amiga demo on a modern fpga, and I saw him get all the timings right for it to finally look smooth as silk on the monitor he had. Then he attached the original signal to a second monitor and the difference was night and day side by side. One was smooth, the other jerky. Both the same fps.

92 points by tronical 5y ago

In the kitchensink demo, the keyboard doesn't show when clicking the input, on mobile.

The biggest problem to me with the old SixtyFPS brand was that it was always just aspirational thing and not really describing any property of the framework. As such it oversold the product and muddled the message as it was easy to point out that it in fact did not always hit 60fps. So while Slint as a brand might be less ambitious, at least it feels bit more honest

boondaburrah 5y ago

The requirements state "If you're using C++, a compiler that supports C++ 20" and All I'm thinkin' is it must be nice to be able to choose a modern compiler like that. Some of us are lucky to get C++14. I'm not saying we should be stuck on old compilers forever, but in C++ land, especially when I have to integrate with other frameworks or game engines, the assumption that I can choose my compiler or will always be on latest kinda irks me. Even Qt has versions for the last few MSVC releases (though thankfully the ABI stopped changing every release after VS2015). That being said, this still looks pretty new, and by the time it's a mature framework C++20 itself may be more available.

s9w 5y ago
milliams 5y ago
I think that's a deliberate decision. They know that by the time it gains adoption even C++20 will be "old". By pinning the requirement high now, while there will mostly be early-adopters, startups, open source projects etc there's less of a cost.
pornel 5y ago
On the Rust side they require a compiler released 10 weeks ago, and it is actually reasonable, thanks to Rust's strong backwards compatibility and painless auto-update.
- boondaburrah 5y ago
  Yeah the problem isn't nearly as pronounced for rust, since rustup exists and rust itself isn't really available on any platforms you can't just update the toolchain yourself. C++ has a lot more tangled dependencies going on especially when you're stuck with a vendor's compiler. Make no mistake: the problem here isn't necessarily technological.
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    I don't understand what would be an environment where you could fetch the latest rust from internet but not the latest clang. I do my builds on centos:8 (well, rockylinux now) and it has access to the latest GCC 11. On Debian derivatives llvm itself provides up to date repos and on Windows, llvm-mingw works perfectly.
    - boondaburrah 5y ago
      Generally, an environment where you can't use clang /at all/. There are many C++ compilers.
      - jcelerier 5y ago
        but this does not make sense. If you can't even change the C++ compiler you use you can't write non-C++ code (e.g. Rust) either. Otherwise let me just fork Clang into the "Gnalc" compiler for the "Sulpsulpees" language which happens to be exactly compatible with the programming language that the clang++-13 binary supports. Takes me a whole 15 minutes, most of which will be taken by forking the LLVM repo on github, and I can guarantee than porting to it will be less effort than porting to Rust. I can even provide the backing of a proper non-profit foundation established on two continents for your legal team's needs.
ahartmetz 5y ago
It's usually very old projects that are stuck with old C++ versions, no? I mostly work in embedded, and even there, new GCC or Clang versions are rarely hard to pull in.

beepbooptheory 5y ago

Any other frameworks that name overlap with a band?

alophawen 5y ago
To name a few: SDL: https://www.discogs.com/artist/707518-SDL https://www.discogs.com/artist/707518-SDL DirectX: https://www.discogs.com/artist/4506329-Direct-X-2 https://www.discogs.com/artist/4506329-Direct-X-2 Vulkan: https://www.discogs.com/artist/1464296-Vulk%C3%A1n https://www.discogs.com/artist/1464296-Vulk%C3%A1n
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
  the "Direct X" one looks like an artist picking a "high-tech" name from a software framework. Slint is the other way around, if anything.
benplumley 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_(band) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_(band)

whylo 5y ago

Hopefully this starts supporting accessibility tools before it gets too much traction and people start shipping inaccessible apps. The WebAssembley output demos on the homepage just render to a <canvas> and are completely inaccessible with any of the usual tools (screen reader, keyboard-only, voice dictation etc) but there's a GitHub issue (https://github.com/slint-ui/slint/issues/32 https://github.com/slint-ui/slint/issues/32) so fingers crossed.

robin_reala 5y ago
Yeah, a UI toolkit that doesn’t have even basic accessibility bindings is basically illegal to use for commercial products in multiple major countries now. No specific shame on Slint (everyone has their own roadmaps) but when even big companies are failing* in this way it does seem like we’ve got a long way to go as an industry. * Flutter has no accessibility bindings on the web and therefore falls under the same “illegal” category.
- nindalf 5y ago
  I’m surprised by how much progress we’ve made in this area. I used to make android apps circa 2013-15. Accessibility was an afterthought, a nice to have. Reading the SwiftUI docs in 2022, it’s front and centre. They tutorial covers accessibility soon after “hello world”. Every module of the tutorial has a section on setting the right accessibility info, rather than a single, optional accessibility tutorial. It makes me happy that doing the right thing is the default. I’m planning on making a small productivity app just for myself, but it’ll be 100% accessible simply because they’ve made it so easy.
  - paxswill 5y ago
    Integrating accessibility into the tutorial is fantastic, but I’d also attribute it to Apple emphasizing accessibility in their developer documentation for a long time. I remember one of the early Interface Builder tutorials explaining accessibility pretty early on.
  - mirashii 5y ago

ComodoHacker 5y ago

Slint sounds to me like a linter for Swift or something like that. A variation on "slick" would be better IMO.

SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
I loved their 1991 album, "Spiderland" https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/may/01/spiderland-slint-album-reinvented-rock https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/may/01/spiderland-sli...
- jfb 5y ago
  It's a classic.

milesvp 5y ago

The need to rebrand is unfortunate. High framerate is not nearly as important as low standard deviation in the framerate. Naughty dog has blogged on the topic, but it was well known decades earlier in the demo scene. Getting smooth animations on old hardware was not trivial, but people discovered that the way the brain and eye work in conjunction, you could create marquees that looked flawlessly smooth at 8 fps provided you always redrew the pixels with very precise timing. I’ve sort of known this for a while, but I got to see a demo a few years ago. A friend set up an old amiga demo on a modern fpga, and I saw him get all the timings right for it to finally look smooth as silk on the monitor he had. Then he attached the original signal to a second monitor and the difference was night and day side by side. One was smooth, the other jerky. Both the same fps.