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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

> it draws its own widgets

I have never seen this go well in practice :( Qt and Flutter do this and the experience is just…not great. Do you have any ideas on how to do better than them if you're using this approach?

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To be clear, we're focusing on the use case of a font editor, where you're mostly interacting with highly custom views, much less so with layouts composed of stock widgets.

As I said elsewhere, increasingly we're in a world where there isn't a standard set of platform UI widgets. I think that was the case when we had Cocoa on macOS, but on Windows it's a choice between MFC, WinForms, WPF, WinUI, and those are only some of the choices offered by Microsoft itself.

It's a good question, though. It's possible somebody will figure out a good way to abstract over officially supported platform UI toolkits, and if so, that might become a compelling choice. This is one reason why the main point of my blog is that we need to figure out the best approach, rather than just assuming we know what to build.

MFC and WinForms both just abstractions over Win32. WPF was clearly targeting being indistinguishable from the old widgets and had a much better success rate than other reimplementation attempts. It's really only with UWP/WinUI that you'd notice the difference without going searching and that has received a lot of consequent complaints.

> WPF was clearly targeting being indistinguishable from the old widgets

we sure as hell haven't been using the same WPF apps

Paint.NET is the one app I've used extensively that I'm aware of being a WPF app, and that's because I remember reading a dev blog about implementing aero glass when 4.0 was being developed.

There are some advantages to this approach that often go unmentioned. Native widgets often have ad-hoc limitations based on their legacy, for example limits on composing/nesting widgets (can a list box contain a list of arbitrary widgets?) and system resource limits (e.g. windows handles). Attempting to build a cross-platform UI that maps to different legacy systems each with their own quirks and limitations, will never produce something better than QT or Flutter IMHO.

You’re right, I think this is the first time I’ve heard someone mention this. I was actually quite surprised when SwiftUI came out because in Cocoa/Cocoa Touch there is a clear set of things you “can” do and everything else would just break and the new declarative language allows (and even encourages) very strange combinations. I haven’t used it a whole lot, but it seems like they’ve done a pretty good job making it mostly work.

> I have never seen this go well in practice :( Qt and Flutter do this and the experience is just…not great.

Well, there are obviously plenty of people who are fairly happy with Qt and Flutter

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