Franz for Windows

Today marks the first beta release of Franz for Windows!

I had been planning to work on a Windows version of Franz since last year. Originally, I was going to implement the UI in C# (or possibly F# after a strong recommendation from Michael Sperber), but then Ben and I wrote a paper ¹ about my declarative wrapper around racket/gui earlier this year and that inspired me to try using it to implement the Windows (and, soon, Linux!) version.

On macOS, Franz is implemented using a combination of Racket for the core logic and Swift for the UI. The Windows version reuses the core and implements all the app's views afresh using gui-easy. The end result is about 5k lines of GUI code, including many small component "tests" that let me easily exercise views in isolation (think SwiftUI Previews, but, well, functional² and interactive). For comparison, the Swift version has about 8.2k lines of Swift code — a mix of AppKit and SwiftUI — and about 4.5k of XML representing XIBs built using the Xcode Interface Builder. Being that racket/gui is a cross-platform library, and therefore it has to target the least common denominator of the three platforms it supports in terms of features, the end result isn't as polished as the Mac version or as a Windows Forms³ version could be, but it gets reasonably close.

Since the source is all Racket, distribution is trivial: just call raco exe to generate an executable and then raco dist to package it up. The only snag has been Microsoft's SmartScreen. I'm not willing to pay for an EV certificate⁴ from one of the blessed vendors, so I need to manually submit new Windows releases to Microsoft to check for malware, but that hasn't been a huge hassle so far, apart from the processing times.

In my original announcement post for Franz I had mentioned that I think this kind of separation between backend and frontend is a very productive way of developing desktop apps and I think that bears out here. I only had to make minimal changes to the core code in order to support this new version and I was able to get everything done in about two months' worth of working in my free time. I think a small team using this model can move very fast and build great native apps for every platform.

Franz is source available so you can take a peek at the implementation yourself if you're interested. If you use Franz for your work, I'd love to get your feedback!