Merenda: Pure Nim GUI toolkit based on Cocoa/OpenStep
Merenda is a new pure Nim GUI framework based on OpenStep and Cocoa with a splash of QT! It's fast, GPU rendered, with themes and look and feel along with a full suite of OpenStep/Cocoa style widgets and an accessibility layer. Support for BIDI and Harffbuzz are coming soon!
It's already implements a substantial amount of the core functionality of OpenStep and Cocoa. It's not a one-to-one implementation, but generally the APIs try to follow Cocoa's design patterns. Though cleaned up to take advantage of Nim's stronger type system than Objective-C.
For example here's the table demo showing a table view backed by a data model:
Overall Merenda is based on several years of working on and experimenting with GUIs. I worked Figuro and was happy with many aspects of it. However the object model ran into limitations when building more complex widgets. Things like:
Merenda solves this by adopting Cocoa's dynamic methods and protocols. These are provided by Sigils. The ability for objects to adopt protocols at runtime enables implementing the rich behavior and functionality seen in Cocoa and iOS.
The implementation of this is called NimKit, mirroring Cocoa's AppKit. NimKit ships the core controls needed for desktop-style interfaces:
- Windows and views: newApplication, sharedApplication, newWindow, newView
- Layout and containers: newStackView, newGridView, newFormView, newSplitView, newScrollView, newTabView, newBox, newGroupBox, newSeparatorBox
- Text: newTextField, newLabel, newTitleLabel, newStatusLabel, newTextEditor, newMonoTextEditor
- Buttons and choices: newButton, newCheckBox, newRadioButton, newComboBox, newPopupMenuButton, newMenu, newMenuItem
- Value and status controls: newSlider, newStepper, newSwitchButton, newProgressIndicator
- Data and navigation views: newTableView, newOutlineView, newCascadingView, newCollectionView, newDocumentTabs, newButtonMatrix, newRadioMatrix
It's been my hobby work the last few months. I've been building and testing all of these, item by item!
Yes it's mostly built with Codex + GPT-5.5 but I continuously review the generated code and refactor and simplify it. Plus more importantly it's based on solid architectural components I've been building for years. It's definitely not what I'd call vibe coded.
