Ultralight dev here-- I've been on the dev-tool side of this equation for the past 13 years so I have insight into why people are actually using HTML/JS/CSS over proprietary UI tech on the desktop.
It's several things-- tons of mature web development frameworks and ecosystems (React, Angular, et al), tons of developers with experience creating and maintaining them, and tons of debugging and support resources (Chrome Dev Tools, Stack Overflow, etc.).
Very difficult to compete against a content creation pipeline like that-- hence why I've made it my mission to get modern HTML UI running performantly everywhere without requiring web developers to learn some new language or toolset.
Also, FWIW, Ultralight does allow you to mix both HTML and native UI (the library can paint offscreen) so you can choose where/when to use each in your app.
WebKit is BSD but has sub-modules with LGPL code (specifically WebCore, JavaScriptCore, and WTF).
Ultralight is not WebKit (we have a totally different API and use our own renderer, compositor, and event-management code) but we do use a fork of WebCore and JavaScriptCore.
Adam, we hung way back I was working on an on device search tool called Orbit that could’ve used Ultralight, I think at bespoke. Been keeping tabs on it since, congrats on the release.
The steps WebKit have made the last few years have been incredible and your further parallelization and optimization work would be so slick, can’t wait to try it out.
I’d love to use it with Tamagui and Vite running all bundling for RN. Silky smooth desktop app, web apps, sites, and mobile apps all easy to design together and deploy nicely to their respective platforms.
>>> Ultralight can emit raw GPU geometry / low-level draw calls to paint directly on the GPU without an intermediate CPU bitmap. We recommend this integration method for best performance
This is sort of where I am, and a lot of people are doing similar explorations, in developing custom GUIs inside the browser that leverage WASM for high performance graphics. I'm using a hybrid bespoke GLSL translations and raw pixel manipulated bitmaps to Canvas2D, eventually targeting a custom webgpu renderer. Main issue is simply browser fragmentation. And, of course, ever larger data visualizations!
It's several things-- tons of mature web development frameworks and ecosystems (React, Angular, et al), tons of developers with experience creating and maintaining them, and tons of debugging and support resources (Chrome Dev Tools, Stack Overflow, etc.).
Very difficult to compete against a content creation pipeline like that-- hence why I've made it my mission to get modern HTML UI running performantly everywhere without requiring web developers to learn some new language or toolset.
Also, FWIW, Ultralight does allow you to mix both HTML and native UI (the library can paint offscreen) so you can choose where/when to use each in your app.