Humble UI offers a Clojure-based desktop UI framework

The Clojure-based Humble UI is being developed as a framework for building high-quality desktop UIs.

Humble UI’s GitHub page says the framework lets developers build better apps quickly while staying cross-platform. Humble’s principal developer, Nikita Prokopov, said work on Humble UI began in 2020. There is no set date for its completion, and it could be another year or so before Humble UI is exposed to a wider audience, he added. “It’s definitely getting closer now, but the scope is still enormous,” Prokopov said. ”We’ll be having a workshop in September, and most of the principal parts at least feel somewhat figured out, so hopefully we’ll move into ‘grow the meat’ phase soon.”

Humble UI began as an alternative to the Electron framework, with developers able to “develop cross-platform desktop apps that do not depend on the web and thus are free of all its shortcomings: performance, execution model, memory requirements, bundle size, etc.,” Prokopov said. He chose Clojure because he prefers the language and is proficient in it. The language’s REPL support was another reason for choosing it. The framework’s GitHub page declares that Clojure is the best language for UI development, stating that Java has a “UI curse” and JavaScript and Chrome impose a “huge” overload and can be slow.

Clojure is performant enough that it doesn’t lag noticeably. It offers access to the full power of the developer’s computer, with multithreading support, and provides a REPL and interactive development, the GitHub page said. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, sharing the Lisp code-as-dynamic philosophy, and is positioned as a dynamic, general-purpose language. Prokopov notes there are other Clojure developer toolkits for desktop, non-web-based apps, such as Seesaw and Membrane, as well as Clojure projects such as babashka, Clerk, and Overtone