Brisk

Brisk is a modern, cross-platform C++ GUI framework designed to build responsive, high-performance applications with flexibility and ease.

Initially developed for a graphics-intensive proprietary project with a complex and dynamic GUI.

[!Note] The Brisk library is currently under active development. Breaking changes may occur, and the documentation might not always be up to date. Contributions are always welcome!

Recommended reading:

➡️ Brisk Design and Feature Overview ⬅️

Documentation on docs.brisklib.com

Key Features 🌟

• Declarative GUI: Enables the creation of complex GUIs in C++ using a flexible declarative syntax.
• Stateful & Stateless Widgets: Supports both modes, with powerful binding for efficient state management.
• Stylesheets: Offers declarative styles to easily modify the application's look and feel.
• Hardware-Accelerated Graphics: Backends include D3D11, D3D12, Vulkan, OpenGL, Metal, and WebGPU.
• Color Processing: Supports various color spaces and linear color blending for physically accurate rendering.
• Unicode Support: Full Unicode support, including RTL text rendering and basic localization features.
• Modular Architecture: Core, Graphics, Window, GUI, and Widgets modules for versatile application development.

Code Example

Component example

const NameValueOrderedList<TextAlign> textAlignList{ { "Start", TextAlign::Start },
                                                     { "Center", TextAlign::Center },
                                                     { "End", TextAlign::End } };

class Example : public Component {
public:
    RC<Widget> build() final {
        // rcnew Widget{...} is equivalent to std::shared_ptr<Widget>(new Widget{...})
        return rcnew Widget{
            layout = Layout::Vertical,
            new Text{
                "Switch (widgets/Switch.hpp)",
                classes = { "section-header" }, // Widgets can be styled using stylesheets
            },

            new HLayout{
                new Widget{
                    new Switch{
                        // Bind the switch value to the m_toggled variable (bidirectional)
                        value = Value{ &m_toggled },
                        new Text{ "Switch" },
                    },
                },
                gapColumn = 10_apx, // CSS Flex-like properties
                new Text{
                    text = Value{ &m_label }, // Text may be dynamic
                    visible =
                        Value{ &m_toggled }, // The Switch widget controls the visibility of this text widget
                },
            },

            // Button widget
            new Button{
                new Text{ "Click" },
                // Using m_lifetime ensures that callbacks will be detached once the Component is deleted
                onClick = m_lifetime |
                          [this]() {
                              // Notify bindings about the change
                              bindings->assign(m_label) = "Updated text";
                          },
            },

            // ComboBox widget
            new ComboBox{
                Value{ &m_textAlignment },  // Bind ComboBox value to an enumeration
                notManaged(&textAlignList), // Pass the list of name-value pairs to populate the ComboBox
            },

            // The Builder creates widgets dynamically whenever needed
            Builder([this](Widget* target) {
                for (int i = 0; i < m_number; ++i) {
                    target->apply(new Widget{
                        dimensions = { 40_apx, 40_apx },
                    });
                }
            }),
            depends = Value{ &m_number }, // Instructs to rebuild this if m_number changes
        };
    }

private:
    bool m_toggled            = false;
    TextAlign m_textAlignment = TextAlign::Start;
    std::string m_label       = "OK";
    float m_progress          = 0;
    int m_number              = 0;
};

Screenshots

Modules

Core

• Compression & Basic Cryptography: Provides data compression and basic cryptographic functions, including hashing algorithms.
• Dynamic Library Loading: Loads and interacts with .dll or .so files dynamically.
• String Manipulation: Handles UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32, with text manipulation utilities.
• Stream I/O: Input/output operations for handling data streams.
• Localization Support: Basic localization and internationalization features for multilingual applications.
• Logging: Built-in logging framework for application diagnostics.
• Reflection: Supports reflection.
• Serialization: Serializes/deserializes data to/from JSON.
• App-Global Settings: Manages global application settings.
• Threading: Provides task queues for multi-threaded applications.
• Binding: Supports value binding, capable of handling multi-threaded environments.

Graphics

• Color & Colorspaces: Supports working with colors, including various colorspaces.
• Geometry: Provides 2D geometry types like Rect, Point, Size, and 2D matrices for transformations.
• Canvas & Path: Supports drawing with paths and Bézier curves.
• SVG Rasterization: Renders SVG images into raster formats.
• Image Processing: Supports image encoding, decoding, resizing, and manipulation.
• Font Handling: Manages fonts, including loading, rendering, caching, and text layout. Supports advanced text shaping (using HarfBuzz).

Window

• Clipboard: Provides clipboard access for copy/paste functionality.
• OS Dialogs: Native dialogs for file open/save, folder selection, and message boxes.
• Display Information: Retrieves and manages display/monitor information from the OS.

GUI

• Widgets: Includes a wide variety of widgets with CSS-style flex layout.
• Style Sheets: Styles your widgets using a stylesheet system that supports property inheritance.
• Binding Support: Data-binding between UI elements and application data. Supports transforming values using a function on-the-fly and compound values (e.g., sums of other values).
• Stateful and Stateless Modes: Choose between stateful widgets for persistent state or stateless widgets for easily rebuilding widget subtrees.
• Drag-and-Drop: Supports drag-and-drop within the GUI, with the option to attach a C++ object to represent the dragged data.

Widgets

• Widgets: Includes buttons, lists, comboboxes, toggle switches, radio buttons, progress bars, sliders, scroll boxes, checkboxes, popup buttons, tabs, tables, spin boxes, dialogs, and more. All public properties are styleable and bindable.
• Layouts: Supports CSS flexbox-style layouts.
• Text Editors: Provides text editing widgets with LTR and RTL text support.

Requirements ⚙️

• C++20 Compiler: Brisk requires a C++20-compatible compiler such as MSVC 2022, Clang, XCode, or GCC.
• Dependency Management: Uses vcpkg to manage dependencies across platforms, simplifying the build process. Alternatively, you can download prebuilt binaries.

Platform Support

	Windows	macOS	Linux
Core Functionality	Beta	Beta	Beta
Graphics	Beta	Beta	Beta
Window System	Beta	Beta	Beta
Widgets	Beta	Beta	Beta
Application Support	Alpha	Alpha	N/A

OS Support

	Minimum version
Windows	Windows 10, Windows Server 2016
macOS	macOS 11 Big Sur
Linux	n/a

Graphics Backend Support

	Backends
Windows	D3D11 and WebGPU (D3D12/Vulkan)
macOS	WebGPU (Metal)
Linux	WebGPU (OpenGL/Vulkan)

Example Projects

The examples directory contains projects that showcase how to use the Brisk library.

For a minimal example, check out the brisk-helloworld repository.

Example Project Binary Size:

OS	Static Build, Release (Full Unicode Support)
Windows x64	10.1 MB (D3D11)
Linux x64	18.2 MB (WebGPU: Vulkan/OpenGL), stripped
macOS x64	16.5 MB (WebGPU: Metal), stripped

These sizes do not include embedded resources (such as fonts).

Development 💻

Brisk is in active development, and we welcome contributions and feedback from the community to improve and expand the toolkit.

The main branch contains the latest features and generally passes all built-in tests ✅. Other branches are reserved for feature development and may be force-pushed.

License 📜

Brisk is licensed under the GPL v2.0 or later. However, for those who wish to use Brisk in proprietary or closed-source applications, a commercial license is also available. For more details on commercial licensing, please contact us at [email protected].