I mean, you don't need a markup file. Qt, Gtk, and others don't require a markup file, but it's optional. And neither generate "glue". They load the markup, render it, and you can reference the elements by ID. Netbeans allowed (allows? I do think it's dead), a WYSIWYG editor for Java interfaces and it straight up generates Java with comments. You can modify the Java and as long as the comments stay put, it can still load the Java - by far the best GUI editing experience I've ever had.

Rust has stuff like makepad that has a DSL using proc macros, slint also has a DSL that is loaded but also allows defining new components in rust that can be used in the DSL.

So no, not everything is as shit as in Microsoft's C++.

Anti Commercial-AI license