Hacker News Reader

Comment by Snetry | Hacker News Reader

Existing frameworks like Qt or GTK could also be used for a Cross-Platform solution

And just because it's electron doesn't mean it's inherently Cross-Platform look at discord for example It took too long for a initial desktop client to be released and then it ha issues with things like screen sharing not working as expected

View on HN

>Existing frameworks like Qt or GTK could also be used for a Cross-Platform solution

They could but finding engineers with that kind of experience would be harder and cost a lot more. Far easier to retrain web frontend engineers.

It isn't like Qt is some bizarre arcane wizardry. You give a web developer a few days and they can productively be contributing to a Qt app.

Yeah but then the dev has to investigate how to solve certain patterns in Qt's ways which they already know how to solve in the web frameworks, and just like with natural languages, sometimes there are no straightforward ports for concepts, and it requires a ton of extra work that you couldn't foresee until getting halfway through the whole project. Adopting new tech is not without serious costs and risks. Also, no GUI framework I've ever seen has figured out a decent composability solution nearly as well done as the DOM, for better or worse. Not to mention the gigantic web ecosystem that just works in Electron.

Sorry, but if the way forward really is that every desktop application of the future has to ship with a full copy of Chrome, come with all the bloat and baggage of the web platform and continue its questionable UI conventions - all just because companies are too cheap to offer some training - then I really don't see how that is a desirable future.

Electron is bad enough from a user perspective, but it's downright horrible to see how it's instilled a rather defeatist approach in front-end developers.

"But I already know Javascript, it's too hard to figure out something else"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com