Hacker News: gen2brain

New comment by gen2brain in "A GTK4 SSH-askpass in Zig"

gen2brain — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 18:50:51 +0000

Sure, you need to wrap it in C, but there is also `cfltk` that is maintained and used in Rust bindings. Btw., the difference in memory usage is huge with GTK4. FLTK hello world is ~10M, GTK3 is ~15M, GTK4 is 40M! With Cairo rendering, it's about 30M, but still a lot.

New comment by gen2brain in "A GTK4 SSH-askpass in Zig"

gen2brain — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 16:22:51 +0000

Nice, I just use lxqt-openssh-askpass, but I am on X11. A lighter alternative (for single-text input) would be FLTK. Version 1.4 is really nice, with Wayland support, and they even draw custom window decorations on GNOME. Both Cairo and FLTK should be able to compile with -X; not sure, though, about the status of the Zig bindings.

New comment by gen2brain in "AI in Linux"

gen2brain — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 16:39:13 +0000

Why not fix all the issues with private jets and yachts first? Why don't they use regular public transportation as we all do? Instead, let's bash poor Clanker, who reviews kernel code.

New comment by gen2brain in "Starling: The first real desktop written by AI"

gen2brain — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 13:32:32 +0000

Well, AI or not, it is interesting to see Swift and Flutter without Dart. But is SNI Tray there? I see something in the top-right corner of that panel, but I'm not sure what it is.

New comment by gen2brain in "Orion Browser by Kagi"

gen2brain — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 11:02:31 +0000

Yes, and you need an army of people to "wrap" WebKit just like that. E.g., the WebKit port on Haiku, of course, is not in good shape because it has more code than the whole of their OS. EFL once had a WebBrowser control/component, maintained by Tizen devs, but of course, it has now been removed. There is no manpower to maintain such control.

New comment by gen2brain in "Frame – Linux X server in Assembly"

gen2brain — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 18:42:50 +0000

I would like to see a similar project that fixes Wayland. Like, can someone vibe-code window positioning, add SSD to GNOME (damage was already done, but still), and add the ability to send events so you can automate and drive the app offscreen for testing.

New comment by gen2brain in "Mozilla: The state of open source AI"

gen2brain — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 15:13:36 +0000

On my device, bars grow as I scroll. I want your feature, being able to just scroll the static page without elements jumping around.

New comment by gen2brain in "Using Go for Mobile Apps"

gen2brain — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 13:56:50 +0000

I did something similar with `go bind`, a library used on both desktop and Android, they simply exchanged JSON, though not on millions of devices. However, today I have a nice cross-platform UI library with native controls, based on IUP, where cross-platform actually means everything, including iOS and Android (and even Haiku). So, you write an app in plain Go, just once, that's it. OK, you would not want the same layout on desktop and mobile, of course, but still the same app.

However, it is still a work in progress, and I would like to improve the mobile support. There are currently many Android-only or iOS-only attributes, but users would still miss some APIs. What are the most essential OS APIs one would need in the app? You can check the library here https://github.com/gen2brain/iup-go .

New comment by gen2brain in "Using Go for Mobile Apps"

gen2brain — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 13:24:01 +0000

Who enables CGO just for DNS resolution? That is not a thing for a long time, you just reminded me of that. Sure, if you have some complex config instead of a simple default, you would want to use libc and getaddrinfo, that is on you. What other issues are there? Go simple uses the network protocol for DNS, and it reads just resolve.conf; it does not care about LDAP or NSS or whatever there is.

New comment by gen2brain in "Neverclick: Desktop application for performing mouse actions with your keyboard"

gen2brain — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 13:04:28 +0000

So, "security" strikes again. Windows shell not be moved, pointers shell not be clicked, but you can move the mouse if you want to.

New comment by gen2brain in "Neverclick: Desktop application for performing mouse actions with your keyboard"

gen2brain — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:49:00 +0000

What about wp_pointer_warp_v1? That should be supported in some compositors. But not sure how to actually "send" the click event.

I often try a session with Labwc/LxQt instead of my Openbox/LxQt, and while there is progress, still not fully usable, so still no Wayland for me. But with X11, I can at least add xvfb, xdotool, and other utils, and AI has no problem writing (and testing) a GUI for me.

New comment by gen2brain in "Neverclick: Desktop application for performing mouse actions with your keyboard"

gen2brain — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:37:59 +0000

I am guessing wp_pointer_warp_v1 in Wayland, but not sure if all compositors support that. And that is just for moving the cursor. Can we "send" a wl_pointer click like that?

New comment by gen2brain in "Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode"

gen2brain — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 08:04:15 +0000

I have a nice setup on my Linux for iOS apps. I compiled the OSXCross toolchain, and also copied iPhoneOS.sdk and iPhoneSimulator.sdk from the macOS VM. With some wrappers, I can compile iOS apps (Obj-C) on my Linux machine, sign them with zsign, and use go-ios to install them on the device.

At first, I just used simulator builds to test (and debug) on the macOS VM, in the simulator, but that was slow and painful. Finally, I bought a used iPhone, all bruised, just so I could test it on a real device. The main issue for me was signing, one cannot register a macOS VM (maybe with some kext hacks?), I managed to enable developer mode on the phone (crazy process, but it worked with Xcode in a VM), I registered the phone on the website, and paid those damn 99$.

I used that for my cross-platform UI library with native controls, based on IUP. Now, future users of the UI toolkit do not need to care about Mac, iOS, or tooling; it just works. You can check the toolkit (WIP) here https://github.com/gen2brain/iup-go .

New comment by gen2brain in "Control the Ideas, Not the Code"

gen2brain — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 13:31:39 +0000

100% of the employers I worked for (one employee) never did that switch. The license did not affect us; we had nothing to do with AWS and the like, so we just continued using Redis like before. We already had our RPM builds, so whatever course distros took, we did not even care to look.

New comment by gen2brain in "Show HN: Shirei, cross-platform GUI framework in native Go"

gen2brain — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 17:57:45 +0000

What does "scale"even mean in UI context? 10 or 100 controls in app makes difference how exactly? Retained apps redraw when needed, they are idle most of the times. How redrawing every frame helps to scale?

New comment by gen2brain in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

gen2brain — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 11:59:06 +0000

Disaster. Well, I read stories about Rust and how there isn't much in the stdlib, but this is just too much. How many dependencies are there, on average, in other projects? I guess I am spoiled with Go.

New comment by gen2brain in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

gen2brain — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 11:41:44 +0000

But this is also just silly. The maintainer here did nothing (just a little chat here and there), but is sure that only optimizations are missing for this to be production-ready. How so, based on what exactly?

New comment by gen2brain in "Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig"

gen2brain — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 10:03:10 +0000

Does alacritty have, and/or work on a library that is reusable in other projects? If not, there is that to start.

New comment by gen2brain in "Deno Desktop"

gen2brain — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:23:16 +0000

How about something like this https://github.com/gen2brain/iup-go? Still not released, but I plan to clean all todos in the next few weeks.

New comment by gen2brain in "Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?"

gen2brain — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 20:44:55 +0000

That is because you call it "soccer"?