Desktop support

[tritao]

Hey @io-eric, congrats on this, cool little language you have built.

Wondering if you would be interested in extending Coi with a desktop target.

I've been playing locally with this idea, using Sokol, Clay, and NanoVG, and so far it seems to hold some promise.

If you think it's interesting, I can send some PRs upstream.

But I can also understand if you would prefer to keep this project strictly focused on the web.

[io-eric]

Hey! Thanks, really appreciate the interest in contributing!

I'm already planning cross-platform support for Coi. The goal is simple: write once, run everywhere, web, desktop, and mobile, without rewriting your views or using platform-specific APIs :)

https://github.com/io-eric/coi/blob/main/FUTURE.md

For rendering, I've been leaning towards Skia + RmlUi as the foundation. The idea is to keep the cross-platform story consistent, same rendering engine across all targets. Skia gives us that unified base, and RmlUi's CSS-like styling fits naturally with Coi's web-first design.

That said, I'm definitely open to exploring different approaches! Would love to hear your thoughts on Sokol/Clay/NanoVG vs the Skia/RmlUi direction. Maybe there are trade-offs or use cases I haven't fully considered.

My current thinking on the architecture:
Web: C++ → WASM → JavaScript bindings
Server: C++ → native binary (first priority - unified client/server codebase)
Desktop: C++ → native binary + Skia/RmlUi
Mobile: WASM + native binding + Skia/RmlUi (enables hot reloading and OTA updates)