linecode/xamlcpp

A cross-platform GUI framework described by XAML, for C/C++

XamlCpp

An implementation of XAML cross-platform framework for C/C++.

This project is NOT complete, and still needs a lot of work. Welcome issues and pull requests!

Goal

The goal of XamlCpp is to write a cross-platfrom GUI application easily and quickly. It uses a dialect of XAML to discribe the UI, but may not support all features like other XAML frameworks do. The final application should be tiny, with a few dependencies, compared to Qt or so.

Charset

XamlCpp uses UTF-16 with Win32, and UTF-8 with others API sets. However, the xaml file should be in valid UTF-8. XamlCpp uses boost-nowide to ensure it.

Reflection

XamlCpp supports reflection. All registered class could be constructed dynamically, and methods, properties and events registered could be accessed dynamically.

A simple example is here.

It doesn't use the RTTI feature of C++, instead, it ownes an stable implementation, because the constraints of the standard are too loose to implement reflection.

The object model of XamlCpp is inspired by COM.

GUI

XamlCpp is a cross-platform GUI framework. With some simple, platform-specific work, you can make your application run on all platforms supported.

An example is here

GUI is divided into several parts. The basic UI project is responsible for the main loop, windows and system dialogs. It is necessary to run a GUI application.

Screenshots

Platform	Win32	GTK+3	Cocoa
Light
Dark

* Due to API limitation, dark mode for Win32 is not completed.

UI

It supports desktop environment with concepts of "window" and "screen", and many dialogs like "message box" and "file box". It also supports high DPI settings even on Windows.

Supported platforms

Name	API set	Supported OS	Recommanded OS
Win32	Windows API, GDI+	Windows*	Windows
GTK+3	GLib, Cairo, Gdk, Gtk	Windows, Linux, MacOS	Linux, Windows/MinGW
Cocoa	Cocoa	MacOS	MacOS

* At least Windows 7.

Controls

Common controls, works on all platforms.

Canvas

A canvas control.

Supported platforms

Name	API set
Win32	Direct2D -> GDI+ *
GTK+3	Cairo
Cocoa	NSGraphicsContext

* Indicates the search order. GDI is not supported because it lacks some key features.

WebView

A webview control.

Supported platforms

Name	API set
Win32	Edge(Chromium) -> Edge -> IE *
GTK+3	Webkit **
Cocoa	WebKit

* Indicates the search order. IE is supported to ensure it could be used.

** Linux only because of the limitation of webkit2gtk.

XAML

XamlCpp uses a dialect of XAML, which may support XAML Standard in the future. XAML files are either interpreted at run-time, or compiled to C++ code at compile-time.

Here's an XAML example:

<window x:class="xaml::test::test_window"
        xmlns="https://github.com/Berrysoft/XamlCpp/"
        xmlns:x="https://github.com/Berrysoft/XamlCpp/xaml/"
        title="Test Window" location="200, 100" size="800, 600">
  <grid margin="10" columns="1*, 0.8*, 1*" rows="1*, auto, 1*">
    <label x:name="mylabel" grid.column="0" grid.row="1" margin="5, 0" text_halignment="right" valignment="center" text="{binding text,element=mybutton,mode=one_way}"/>
    <button x:name="mybutton" grid.column="1" grid.row="1" click="on_button_click">Hello</button>
    <canvas grid.column="0" grid.row="2" margin="10" redraw="on_canvas_redraw"/>
  </grid>
</window>

The xmlns should be https://github.com/Berrysoft/XamlCpp/ to use default controls. The xml attributes decribes the properties, events and attach properties of a control.

The XAML parser uses a modified version of rapidxml_ns. It is modified to use features of C++ 17 and simplified to support UTF-8 only for convenience.

Detector

XamlCpp provides a detector called xmald to show the reflection infomation of a dynamic library for XamlCpp.

Resource

XamlCpp provides a resource compiler called xamlrc, to embed small files into the final program. It supports UTF-8 only.

Build

A C++17-compliant compiler is required. Actually it needs C++20, but no compiler is compliant...

This project assumes it is built by GCC 10.0+ or Clang 10.0+ when using GNU or LLVM toolchains.

Build on Windows

MSVC

wil and boost-nowide are required. vcpkg is recommanded for installing. Other packages will be downloaded from NuGet when configuring.

MinGW

gtk, pkgconfig and boost are required. MSYS2 is recommanded for installing and building.

It is not possible now to build target Windows API with MinGW toolchain, because wil isn't supported by GCC or Clang/MinGW.

Build on Linux

gtk, webkit2gtk and pkgconfig are required.

Build on Mac

Mac OS 10.15+ is required for some C++17 features (<any> and <filesystem>)

boost is required.

Cocoa

No other package is needed.

Gtk

gtk and pkgconfig are also required.