I'm looking for systematic review of the algorithms used for GUI layout. I'm particularly interested in the algorithms that favor speed over complexity, but it's hard to find anything useful other than "don't use constraint sovers".
So far the best one I've found is Constraint Solving for Beautiful User Interfaces: How Solving Strategies Support Layout Aesthetics by Clemens Zeidler,Christof Lutteroth and Gerald Weber. Unfortunately it is very short and is not very specific.
The layout algorithm landscape looks to me like this so far:
There's everybody's darling Cassowary that made its way just about everywhere.
There's the Auckland Layout Model which no one seems to use but thanks to its authors being prolific writers is well known.
There's the universally hated HTML/CSS combo that completely destroys the former two when it comes to the flow layout (especially the text flow).
Next come the algorithms used in desktop GUI frameworks, with WPF, Qt and MigLayout for Swing lauded the most. (I haven't figured out their performance characteristics yet, but I remember being disappointed by WPF layout speed compared to WinForms - the gains from faster drawing were offset by slower layout)
Than there's a handful of game engines UIs that no one seems to know anything about.
The rest are the ancient GUI toolkits that typically have an unsophisticated grid container as their most potent layout tool.
Have I missed anything significant?