it calls to me. yet again i am tempted by fate to start working on a gui library in rust that is less garbage than the existing ones. one that unapologetically looks like either windows 10 or windows 98, because none of the linux ui toolkits actually look good at present. qt comes close but it kinda sucks and still looks like shit compared to windows 98. i have never even used windows 98, this is not nostalgia. it just has better widgets than any modern ui toolkit. windows 10 is somewhat on a similar level, windows 7 comes after. gtk can be fine sometimes but its unfortunately gnome. gtk2 is fine, gtk3 can die, gtk4 also, qt is broken but would be okay if not.

it calls to me.

it calls to me but i must resist. the sorrow and despair of writing code that uses a GPU in any way still lingers and i do not want to awaken it again, because if i do, it will ruin many days. i could render on the CPU, or use some abstraction, but the abstraction will kill the compile time and the cpu-based rendering will kill the run time. there is no way for me to write an app that is both performant in compilation and in runtime, unless i write the whole stack or write so much of the stack that i will feel despair. the mere thought of interacting with opengl and C libraries brings me almost physical discomfort. i could probably interact with a GPU if i write the display server, write the kernel, build the GPU, and design the motherboard, but unfortunately everything is already done, and it is done in the worst possible way. it would genuinely feel less horrible to write my graphical applications for a god-damned C64 just because of how fucking rancid the modern graphics stack is. opengl is a cancer, and so is everything that brings my applications their opengl.

i know how to write shaders, i know what gpus are like, i have written things that run on the cpu that are essentially identical to a shader. and yet, opengl manages to be so repulsively designed that i retch even at the thought of writing something that uses it.

i will not answer the call.