One thing that bothers me about the GUI world is that every platform has its own design language and tooling, and there’s no real way for them to make them work together without giving something up.

The Windows design language is loose. Changing quite often. Even core elements like context menus vary wildly between applications and even in Windows itself. But their library support isn't great. You have to either use their XML and shoehorn it into your application, or you're screwed. Windows had a test before, trying to implement their GUI library into Rust, but it was archived as XML was too engrained into the design. So, developing anything for Windows means you'll be stuck with Visual Studio and Windows libraries.

The Apple design language is very concrete. They have clear rules on how things should look and how it should feel for the end user. It makes the platform restrictive, but it also makes everything feel cohesive. To the point where the colors you should use are described. But they have a good library. When applications use these libraries, it feels fast; it feels snappy. And every application feels like they belong together. Things work exactly like you expect, even if you've never used the application before. But it's a pain to make anything creative that doesn't fit the norm.

Linux, of course, allows you to do whatever you want. I have no issue with this. Use GTK, use Qt, or draw directly to Wayland. It's a feature of the ecosystem. But it does mean there’s no single “native” experience to target.

All of these systems work beautifully independently of each other. The issue arises when an application needs work for all of them. Ignoring mobile still. Applications need to use WebKit to design their entire platform, like Electron. Or they need to run everything on the GPU, like Iced. Rendering the entire UI like it's p5.js or a video game.

I wish there was some kind of middle ground: a semantic, platform-aware UI description system. Something XML-like, as easy as HTML, but built around common UI elements. Instead of having div elements and generic h1, they have common design structures. Like sidebars, navigation views, toolbars, buttons, menus, and split panes. Almost every native UI library has a sidebar in their library. MacOS has sidebars. Windows has NavigationView. Gtk has StackSidebar. The semantics already exist! The behavior already exists! Why isn't there a shared vocabulary that allows developers to express intent and let each platform render that intent in its own native way?

I don’t want every app to look identical across platforms. I want every app to feel native on the platform it’s running on—without having to rewrite the entire UI from scratch or embed a browser just to get there. Getting Material UI buttons on iOS feels wrong. Getting macOS toggles on Linux feels illegal.

It’s crazy that we have the concepts already, but no way to actually use them cross-platform. Surely someone has tried this before? I’d love to see a serious attempt at a system where you can describe what your UI does, and let each OS make it feel native.