Solenoid: yet another desktop application framework

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solenoid: yet another desktop application framework

solenoid is a framework for making desktop applications. You know maybe about Electron and Tauri. The project started as Tauri clone in Zig.

I needed the zig-gobject bindings for v0.17.0 but it isnt available at the time. so i forked zig-gobject repository and updated it to v0.17.0 version of Zig. (The PR)

So finally i had the bindings. Then i started writing the rendering stuff. It was fantastic, i rendered my first html, css and js files. Browse source

After that, i wrote command/plugin system. Its very simple, you only throwing fetch request from your frontend code. Then Zig side parses it and executes the command.

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The assets generator logic is awful for now. You need to generate an assets.zig file after you build your frontend.

pub const Asset = struct {
    path: []const u8,
    data: []const u8,
    mime: [*:0]const u8,
};

I couldnt find a useful way to generate that at compile time. If anyone can help, I can (maybe[1]) do it. The asset generator script

About cross-platform compability, currently only supports Linux because it uses WebKitGTK. I wrote a cross-platform window management library like webview, named as pencere
I will implement it to solenoid sometime. But i havent tested it on Windows and macOS very well. it needs more work.

I use Zine for the website. Thanks kristoff-it and the contributors.

You can check out the examples

I know more or less that no one will do this, but I’ll warn you anyway: dont use it in production (yet) :slight_smile:

Links

Code: https://codeberg.org/Erenay/solenoid
Website: https://solenoid.erenaydev.com.tr (I havent purchased a domain yet)
pencere code: https://codeberg.org/Erenay/pencere

Supported Zig versions

v0.17.0 (master)

AI / LLM usage disclosure

  • the idea belongs to me. I asked to a LLM for brainstorming somethings before coding a single line of code.
  • I used LLM to help me with the pencere code in a part of macOS

  1. Due to the college entrance exam, I wont be available for the next 8 months. I wanted to create a post about solenoid and stop using the computer until the exam. ↩︎