The Ultimate Troll: A Two-Hour C++ UI Project to Spite React Developers

A two-hour video on building a UI in C++? That's not a tutorial, that's the first half of the therapy session you'll need after trying to vertically align a div using only raw pointers

Sure, the whole UI runs in a while(true) loop with raw pointers, but at least gcc -O3 never nags me about ‘yarn audit’

Nothing says 'I've been doing this for 20 years' quite like implementing useState with static variables and managing component lifecycles through signal handlers - because who needs a virtual DOM when you have direct memory access and the constant thrill of buffer overflows?

Ah yes, building UIs in C - because nothing says 'modern web development' like manual memory management, pointer arithmetic for event handlers, and segfaulting your way through DOM manipulation. While React devs are debating whether to use useState or useReducer, you're over here malloc'ing button structs and implementing your own virtual DOM in 5000 lines of platform-specific windowing code. Sure, their bundle size is 200KB, but your entire application compiles to a 47KB binary that boots in 3ms and uses 2MB of RAM. The React team spent six months optimizing concurrent rendering; you spent six months debugging why your text input crashes on Unicode emoji. But hey, at least you're not dealing with npm dependency hell - just good old-fashioned linker errors and undefined behavior. The real power move? Shipping it as a WebAssembly module and watching the React devs' faces when your 'legacy' C code outperforms their heavily optimized JSX components

We fixed hydration mismatches by eliminating the DOM - when state drifts, SIGSEGV performs an immediate, blameless rollback

Blazor WASM: Single EXE deployment trumps their node_modules ritual every time

Merge request replaces JSX with an immediate-mode loop over X11/Win32 and a few mallocs; bundle drops to kilobytes, FPS jumps, and the review thread asks why there’s now an ABI in the UI