What we found after trying lots of different layout strategies on our iOS App was that Autolayout in code was the simplest to maintain, and still using Apple technology, contrary to ReactNative for example. Furthermore we were absolutely against reinventing a heavy layout engine knowing we had Autolayout at hand. The syntax was very harsh on the eyes though so we looked into ways to make it better, and Stevia (healthy syntactic sugar) was born!
Thanks a lot for the kind words :)
This is indeed vastly inspired by Visual Format Language purposefully so, so that there's nothing more to learn.
This actually does pretty much the same thing behind the hood. We can say this is just Apple's visual format on steroids.
Three reasons mostly motivated us : 1. having the compiler on our side and not just hope the string would parse fin at runtime.
2. Laying out Horizontal and Vertical layout at the same time
3. Having something readable cause readable == maintainable :)