So VB6 or earlier is what you are probably remembering, and VB has a fascinating history as it started life as a wysiwyg design tool before it was attached to any language.

However, you need to remember that these simpler tools were a product of a much simpler set of requirements. Fixed themes, fixed screen size, fixed aspect ratios. I imagine a wysiwyg editor that gives you all the power of, say, CSS, and yet remains simple for simple things, sounds like a much more difficult task. I haven’t worked on UI in 20 years, so maybe such tools do exist.

OK, but what about actually using a GUI toolkit to make an actual application?

You can optimize a library to make it comparatively simple to draw a circle on a screen. But that tells me nothing about binding state, signals, styling, widget hierarchy, etc. Maybe these frameworks look complicated to you because doing something more than drawing a circle is actually more complicated.

This is what you can with Qt:

    #include <QApplication>
    #include <QWidget>
    #include <QPainter>

    class widget : public QWidget {
    void paintEvent(QPaintEvent*) override {
        QPainter(this).drawEllipse(QPoint(320, 240), 100, 100);
    }
    };

    int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
        QApplication app(argc, argv);
        widget w;
        w.resize(640, 480);
        w.show();
        return app.exec();
    }

It doesn't seem too complicated to me.

    from tkinter import \*

    root = Tk()
    a = Label(root, text ="Hello World")
    a.pack()

    root.mainloop()

yep, dripping in AI.

It's a real problem, so many projects are adding features at breakneck speed, but with so many bugs and so little understanding.

Maybe that's just how it all works now, but I don't like it.

GPUI is written in Rust, so in this specific case the decision is already somewhat made for you.

If I remember correctly, Zed's framework didn't set the goal of being able to draw arbitrary graphics/UI and by constraining that, it basically managed to represent everything with quads and distance fields in shaders, which reduced draw calls and GPU state management to a minimum.

> how do I choose between Gooey and GPUI?

GPUI is for rust, not zig

I mean GPUI is rust and Gooey is Zig so if you wanna do a project in Zig you probably wouldn’t choose GPUI.

I also have one [1]. It's a good name :-)

[1]: https://github.com/creativescala/gooey

I have also found a UI framework in C++ with OpenGL named Gooey (2008-ish).

And in early 2000, I was in a mailing list for designing a successor/replacement to X11, code-named "Gooey" that never went anywhere.