As funny anecdote, CSS Grid was originally proposed by XAML team.
Google apparently is pushing for the low level rendering control that native UI APIs enjoy on their Houdini project. Right now, it is yet again a Chrome only feature.
Oh, and that one is practically designed around a hybrid C++, so if you don't like C++ (last time I tried C++ with mingw on Windows I had a horrible time installing libraries), you're out of choices.
msys2 (http://www.msys2.org/) solves package management quite nicely, at least for the more popular libraries and tools.
QML and JavaFX are cross-platform, XAML is cross platform via Avalonia or Xamarin.Forms.
Anyone using C++ on Windows for GUI development should use Visual C++, C++ Builder or the gcc toolchain integrated in the Qt installer.
Avalonia is at beta level at best, would you bet your startup on it? Xamarin.Forms ok, but XAML is not 100% the same everywhere, anyway. WPF is not Xamarin.Forms.
http://gluonhq.com/products/mobile/
> XAML is not 100% the same everywhere, anyway.
Hence XAML Standard,
And be incredibly shitty.
If you care about your users and their experience, you won't write apps in JS to begin with.
Anything else should take advantage of the native UI/UX tooling.
* Standards based with no single entity or company "owning" it.
* Multiple mature competing implementations.
* Massive support across the industry and a huge ecosystem.
I am yet to see the huge ecosystem for Web components that matches component libraries like those from DevExpress or ComponentOne.
Lately, major vendors (with Edge, that includes Microsoft) are agreeing on standards, developing them FAST, and the web moves forward faster than it has ever moved. Long gone are the days where your standards can get stopped for multiple years. And vendor prefixes are less prevalent now as features get implemented properly sooner.
https://ishoudinireadyyet.com/
https://www.webcomponents.org/
Also, to use those standards, one needs to have access to latest browser versions, which never happens beyond controlled environments.
So typical web development always needs Modernizr, Babel, Polyfills (when possible) around.
Your argument makes no sense in the year 2018.
Of course if they just stick with the ideal model of hypertext documents, with a little bit of JS, it doesn't make sense.
As for web apps, I am ok with them, provided they run on the browser I have already installed, instead of faking native apps.
I'm genuinely curious. Years ago, I used several Qt apps, and they never felt native. They felt like Java Swing or Delphi apps. Clunky and not pretty. Slack, to me, doesn't _look_ quite native, but it still doesn't feel like an outsider on the platform.
I imagine that using native Apple kits are easy from C++ thanks to ObjC interop, no idea about Android.
Having to manually mutate the UI instead of describing it with a `render` function feels like a huge step back. Even data binding is often too limited.
Trying to get a screen in Android to have the correct layout and style is also way clunkier - even with ConstraintLayout.
If you have been building GUIs in Visual Studio or VBA, you're probably not going to suddenly switch to Electron.
And if you have mostly been writing Python scripts for the terminal, you might use something like Gooey [1] to build a basic GUI with almost no additional effort.
Web stack doesn't have any mature option, besides maybe avril, that matches what something like Blend or QML designer offers.
I mean, shouldn't you care more about shipping a good product (i.e. developing something that doesn't thrash your users' resources) than ease of development?
I get that if it's too hard to develop there's no product to speak of, but still, aren't we going too far off the equilibrium point?