George (Oct 28 2026 at 09:16): George (Oct 28 2026 at 09:16):Let's say I wanted to create a cross-platform task manager, like Super Productivity (or Todoist, etc.), and I wanted to do it in Roc, which GUI library/framework would I use? I know there's roc-ray, roc-gui, joy, terrocotta and there might be more.
It would be great to have a native GUI (i.e. not building on web views so that excludes joy) but I also want to leave an easy path to make it a browser app via wasm.
I'd guess that all the libs mentioned above could do the job in theory, but I feel kind of lost on how to make the choice. Maybe someone has an input on how to view this decision on a more "philosophical level" if that makes sense?
Or maybe just chime in with what you would pick for the job and why.
George (Oct 28 2026 at 09:18):I'm especially curious what @Luke Boswell has to say since he (co-)created many of the existing GUI libraries
Luke Boswell (Oct 28 2026 at 09:28):If we assume theyre all equally mature... roc-gui is probably the best choice. Or Karl's gui platform (which he hasnt shared yet :wink:).
I think the gui aspect of roc-ray is better suited for games, though you definitely could.
I think the capabilities oriented security model and builtin testing for roc-gui makes something like this much nicer to work with.
However.... if you wanted to ship it today roc-ray (and terrocotta on top of that) is definitely the most mature.
Luke Boswell (Oct 28 2026 at 09:33):Regarding the easy path to web... if you are careful about how you structure your app you could probably have two app roots, one could be roc-signals for the web and the other roc-gui. They're both Action-State so the abstractions will be similar.
roc-signals is also experimental.
It kind of comes down to what your goals are here, like learning Roc or platform development.
I call these experimental because making a gui platform is enormous scope and takes a long time to test things properly.
Luke Boswell (Oct 28 2026 at 09:34):I mean two apps that share a common core
George (Oct 29 2026 at 05:57):@Luke Boswell
So I looked a bit more into roc-gui and I wanted to try persisting application state via SQLite, but I saw that the roc-gui platform gives you read-only sqlite access. What's up with that?
Luke Boswell (Oct 29 2026 at 06:58):I haven't got to that yet, it's a wip -- if you feel like fixing it and making a PR I'd love the help :smile:
I've been trying to fix infrastructure issues and set things up like tooling so it is easy to build and scale. I've also been feeding a lot of bug reports back upstream and coordinating those with the roc compiler which delays everything. roc-gui has been amazing for flushing out bugs, it's really pushed the limits of the compiler.
Last updated: Nov 04 2026 at 18:54 UTC