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Comment by rolleiflex | Hacker News Reader

Same here. I designed and built the first version of Aether with Qt5 via Python. It was a miserable experience where the only way to solve certain things were to insert non-meaningful text into certain magic Python fields which would go and compile in C++. Plus a few hundred iterations of getting the magic incantations to work in a consistent manner.

For the second version — I've moved to Electron for UI and Go binaries for actual heavy lifting. At least that one is a known pain you can Google for.

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PySide2 makes this way easier. I recently setup a PySide2 Project in PyCharm with the integrated package-management and it was a breeze (I guess the official support helps a lot as opposed to PySide[1]). First tried several other graphical libraries and was getting nowhere, but was happy that the Qt integration was relatively painless.

On a related note, does anyone know of a way of creating a "stand-alone binary" or installer for PySide2?

PyInstaller and cx_freeze both work with PyQt, afaik, so they probably work with pyside too.

There is also some other project (fsmb? Something like that) that is focused towards packaging pyqt apps, but it requires you to adopt its framework.

Indeed lack of a good (Tkinter just doesn't offer all the necessary widgets, looks and feels clumsy) modern pythonic GUI toolkit seems the biggest problem of Python to me.

Nevertheless I'm surprised to read you had to compile anything (if you don't mean using pyuic5 to generate Python classes from QtDesigner XML files) and deal with C++ while using Qt5 with Python.

They are now investing into Python as official supported language.

https://www.qt.io/qt-for-python

Well, it was about time. Pyside is a quite old project that for a while almost seemed to have fallen into oblivion. Glad to see that they are finally using it as official binding tool.

WxWidgets is now available & stable(!) for Py3 and available on PyPI for easy installation & distribution. Moreso, the dev pipeline has been streamlined and they are now able to follow upstream much more closely! Maybe this is sth for you.

Regarding Go / Browser interaction sI've stumbled on two libs : https://github.com/zserge/lorca to integrate chrome as a UI (smaller than electron apparently) and https://github.com/zserge/webview (not tested myself and the second one is rewritten currently)

I just run Go binaries and talk to them using gRPC. As a real world example on how to do that, here's my app: https://getaether.net and here's the source code: https://github.com/nehbit/aether.

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