Show HN: A Modern GUI Library for Ada: CSS Styling, XML UI, SDL3

Looks great! I was particularly impressed by the following: >"A built-in lightweight HTML view widget renders documentation-style markup with cascading styles." Basically you built a miniature, integrated, embedded, open-source web browser which can parse CSS and render to SDL... very impressive!: https://github.com/ovenpasta/adi2/blob/master/src/adi-widget... https://github.com/ovenpasta/adi2/blob/master/src/adi-widget... Also, it should be possible to easily, easily port this source code to Delphi and/or FreePascal and/or Graeme Geldenhuys' "Blaise" language (A modern, self-hosting Object Pascal compiler, https://github.com/graemeg/blaise) should anyone in those respective communities decide to do that... Also, if Ada had an {$IFDEF} equivalent, then with proper use of {$IFDEF's} (since the source code is so similar across these language families), the source code could potentially support all of the above languages from a single source code base... But, of course, maybe that wouldn't be desired... maybe individual ports would serve those other communities better... and then again, maybe it wouldn't! (Just thinking aloud... :-) ) Anyway, great work, and once again, very impressed by the lightweight HTML view widget!

Cool project. Good idea to use SDL3; it brings along much more than SDL2 where you had to use a lot of other libraries to become platform independent with all features. The disadvantage might be that SDL3 itself (as SLD2) is pretty big. Ada got a bit out of fashion (unfortunately) but it's still an impressive, excellent language. Still an interesting choice. Maybe you can give more information about your choice and plans with the GUI library.

I'm not very good at programming. I tried to run this on Windows 11 and ran into some issues but managed to get most of the examples mostly working after a while. They were all missing text but most of the pictures and css would render. I used msys2 (and spammed Gemini with error messages) for building manually but had to modify a number of the build files after making sure I had all the SDL3 bits installed. I'm assuming I did something wrong on my end, but commenting here to let you know I did have problems building and running this on Windows. I am interested in learning the Ada language and wanted to use it to make very simple desktop apps for Windows. The GUI options for Windows were always kind of rough.

What do you think would make someone choose Adi2 over Qt or Flutter?

Why would anyone choose XML for a modern GUI layout in 2026? That seems like a mis-step.