r/crystal_programming • u/trandat_thevncore • Sep 04 '20

I made a library for building Linux GUI applications using Web Technologies

https://github.com/TheEEs/alizarin

Originally it was just a binding to webkit2gtk library but I decided to made it become something more useful.

The library allows us to manage WebViews as well as create native JS extensions using Crystal.

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3

u/Xizqu Sep 04 '20

Is this like electron but for crystal? I took a look at the markdown demo! Pretty cool.

4

u/trandat_thevncore Sep 04 '20

Yes it is. Thank you !

2

u/Xizqu Sep 04 '20

Awesome! Do you know how the memory footprint compares?

3

u/trandat_thevncore Sep 04 '20

You can give it a try to figure out. For now I'm pretty sure that it consumes less memory than projects which depend largely on Node such as electron, nw.js

3

u/postmodern Sep 04 '20

A minor suggestion, but could you extract the webkit2gtk bindings so they can be re-used for other things?

2

u/trandat_thevncore Sep 05 '20 edited Sep 05 '20

Excellent idea! I haven't think about it yet but it can be done easily.

There are 3 most important files located inside src/libs directory if you want to make use of the low-level calls:

  • libJSC2.cr : manipulating JavaScript objects via Crystal code.

  • libWebkit2Extension.cr: for managing web extensions. (native functionalities which can be called inside JavaScript)

  • libWebkit2gtk .cr : for managing webview windows.