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Comment by wh313 | Hacker News Reader

It's because Electron has taken over desktop app development. While it does significantly lower the knowledge barrier to building desktop applications, it does come with a heavy memory overhead.

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As an end-user of software, which do you value more?:

a. A smaller executable that makes efficient use of your machine's resources

b. A developer with less knowledge and experience who is able to write a memory-hogging desktop application

Most end users have 2-4GB of RAM, it's not a choice, 'a' is the only option.

Electron lowers the knowledge barrier for people who are already knowledgeable in web development. For others, learning Electron can be far more complicated than learning, say, Vala or PyQt or Tk or even one of the plethora of Java toolkits, just as examples.

Honest question: What's an easy-to-use, popular cross-platform framework with bindings to a sane language? Something like QT/GTK to Python? I hate Electron, but what's the alternative? I used wxWindows back in the day, with Boa Constrictor, and I loved that workflow.

So I don't know about the definition for popular or sane languages but FWIW Lazarus is a free framework for producing truly portable, native applications for Windows/Mac/Linux/Android/iOs from the same code project. Think FOSS child of Delphi from back in the day.

Ah, yes, I've heard good things about Lazarus. The problem with it is that it uses its own language (Delphi, as you say), so it's got its own ecosystem and things. No matter how good the UI toolkit is, it's not worth giving up all the niceties of a language with an extensive ecosystem, for me.

It's a pity, because Lazarus does seem fantastic for desktop application development...

Why do you think Lazarus doesn't have or interact with an extensive ecosystem?.

Because I don't hear free pascal as often as Python.

All it needs is a critical mass of users and the right support from some big names; if Go was developed outside Google it probably won't be where it is today. I'm not a fan of Pascal, though I really enjoyed using Delphi at work many moons ago, to me promoting Lazarus is also a way to tell other IDE developers that Delphi and today Lazarus got things right; it's not just about the language.

If you use QT and QML, you can write most (sometimes all) of your code in JavaScript.

Whether you consider JavaScript a sane language is up to you. :)

Lazarus: http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ It does multiplatform the right way, that is, compiling natively for every architecture instead of creating slugginess and bloat by forcing software to run interpreted or under VMs. Here are some projects using it. http://wiki.freepascal.org/Projects_using_Lazarus Also, both the IDE and generated software can run on different architectures, including ARM based boards such as the Raspberry PI and similar ones. I played with it also on Orange and Nano PIs with just one gig RAM: definitely not fast but useable; it should scream on the Odroid C2 or faster boards. My only wish is having something similar for Nim.

Yeah, as I said in a sibling comment, Lazarus is pretty much exactly how things should work. I share your wish, though, I wish they had Python/Nim/Rust/something bindings.

I think wxWidgets is still around and they have Python bindings (not used it, but have used the C++ wxWidgets a lot).

Xamarin + native UIs

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