Add support for display GUI

[falhumai96]

Just a thought suggestion, if it is possible to add the ability to display GUI binaries or possibly render 2D/3D GUI (say code compiled with OpenGL). From an experience standpoint, it might look like KMSDRM where you can render GUI directly from the shell.

[holzschu]

I think that's a long term goal, not a short term goal. We may get there, but not in the short term.

[Emasoft]

I think it is better to stick to TUI and CUI, otherwise Apple is gonna take a-Shell down for sure.

But you can do almost anything with libraries like Textual

[falhumai96]

I don't think GUI will violate the AppStore guidelines. Textual is a nice app to create terminal configuration menus for e.g., such as menuconfig, but it's not perfect. I think it's best if there is a support for something similar to KMSDRM on Linux where you can render full graphics support on the shell. This would have so much potential to test the performance of a-shell's wasm3's or lli's interpreters to process graphics for benchmarking.

Also, there are apps that render GUI while running user-written scripts. Take Pythonista (from my own experience it has now template game scripts built using Python that u can render in Pythonista) as an example, or Apples own built Swift Playgrounds app. There is even a Swift IDE right now that allows you to run a Swift interpreter for app simulation, called App Maker: https://www.appmakerios.com/.

a-shell is amazing, but it can be improved with GUI support. That's my two cents. You guys know best.

[holzschu]

I agree the challenge for adding a GUI is technical, not AppStore guidelines. We already support JavaScript user interface (you can show a JS query, and it will appear in a window). A possible timeline would be:

• run WebAssembly programs in web workers, allowing for parallel execution of multiple programs.
• add continuous keyboard input to WebAssembly programs (right now, it's not very robust and crashes if used too frequently).
• extend WebAssembly execution to WebGL.
• add a GUI library compiled to WebAssembly (?)