Comment by jason_oster

Every "OO for UI" approach I've seen breaks most of the rules of object-oriented design.

GTK, Qt, DOM, WinUI 3, Swing, Jetpack Compose, and GWT (to name a few) all provide getters and setters or public properties for GUI state, violating the encapsulation principle [1]. The TextBox/EditBox/Entry control is the perfect example.

The impedance mismatch is that a GUI control is not an object [2]. And yet, all of the object-orient GUI examples listed implement their controls as objects. The objects are not being used for the strengths of OO, it's just an implementation detail for a procedural API. The reason these GUIs don't provide an API like shown in [1] is because it's an impractical design.

"How are you supposed to design an OO TextEdit GUI control if it can't provide a getter/setter for the text that it owns?" Exactly. You're not supposed to. OOP is not the right model for GUIs.

Ironically, SwiftUI doesn't have this problem because it uses the Elm Architecture [3] like React and iced.

[1]: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2163972/building-user-inte...

[2]: From [1], "All the rules in the rule-of-thumb list above essentially say the same thing — that the inner state of an object must be hidden. In fact, the last rule in the list (“All objects must provide their own UI”) really just follows from the others. If access to the inner state of an object is impossible, then the UI, which by necessity must access the state information, must be created by the object whose state is being displayed."

[3]: https://guide.elm-lang.org/architecture/