scenic

If you'd like to try your hand at an approachable functional language (Elixir): https://github.com/boydm/scenic

Yeah, if you NEED to do a non web UI in BEAM land, there's basically this, scenic[1], or java bindings. [1] https://github.com/boydm/scenic

The "specific problem domain" for Erlang is scalable, reliable network services. The problem with GUIs is that making a simple UI is relatively easy, but making a really world class native UI is practically almost impossible. Witness the fact that even Microsoft is using Electron instead of writing native GUI code. One of the really fundamental problems is that GUIs need to be done in the native language of the OS (e.g. C++), so any scripting language either needs glue like pyqt or to talk over a socket to a GUI, which limits performance. Having said that, you can make ok GUIs in Erlang with the wx libraries, and there is Scenic for making custom UIs for e.g. embedded systems https://github.com/boydm/scenic

My favorite part about the presentation was the correlations between the DOM tree and a supervision tree. If you've looked into the Scenic project (https://github.com/boydm/scenic) you know how this Process & Supervision model shows real promise for client-side UI concurrency. As your states are changing you don't want one bad state to crash and cascade elsewhere - supervision trees lets you contain and recover from failures gracefully. I'll be honest I didn't think it would be possible to implement something like the BEAM's preemptive scheduler in WebAssembly until I saw the presentation. Turns out it's very doable with continuations. The timing should be right in the next couple years as both Lumen and some of the bigger components of WebAssembly maturity kick into gear. Similar high level language/runtime -> WebAssembly projects like B

possibly the elixir project Scenic? https://github.com/boydm/scenic

Here's the github page[0] for Scenic with a brief description [0] https://github.com/boydm/scenic

I think at the annual Flutter conf in November they said they will be working towards making flutter officially support desktops. I hope Flutter and ScenicUX[1] can become strong options for building lightweight, good looking UIs for apps and embedded device interfaces. By 'embedded' I mean something like a raspi connected to a 7" touch screen [1]: https://github.com/boydm/scenic/blob/master/README.md

OTPCL/Scenic OK... You'd probably need an additional library (that may not exist yet) for the widget aspect... But it moves the needle a bit... https://github.com/boydm/scenic

Aside from Scenic (https://github.com/boydm/scenic) and Nerves (https://nerves-project.org/), Phoenix LiveView is the new Elixir thing I'm most excited about. I mean, I already 'bought in' to the ecosystem for many other reasons, but these are / could be huge extra reason because 1) they solve problems I'm facing, and 2) the potential popularity might alleviate the mild nervousness I have about investing so much into what is still a very young and small ecosystem. As it is, I still hesitate to use Elixir/Phoenix with many of my clients.

Now that RAM is relatively cheap and garbage collection algos are pretty decent, immutability should be the default, because it eliminates an entire class of bugs while enabling benefits like "easy" lock-free concurrency, etc. Here's a project I'm excited about, I think it's the first fully-functional/immutable/declarative cross-platform GUI library in existence https://github.com/boydm/scenic Still pretty rudimentary but has made great strides in a year and the demo is pretty amazing (especially given how NOTORIOUSLY gui toolkits are typically OOP/procedural/mutable) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QNxLNMq3Uw Boyd Multerer got famous via Xbox Live.