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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of sad though because it's still 10X easier to build a browser app than a native app simply because of the wealth of highly-usable stuff written for JS.

Every time I have to build a GUI in Linux I just build a webapp that connects to a TCP backend on localhost because that way I can just build a beautiful UI in HTML/JS/CSS and I don't have to deal with the mess that is GTK, QT, TCL, TK, and all that crap.

Android programming is another can of worms and I'm frankly fed up with Gradle updates breaking my project every update and needing 79+ files, multiple cludgy steps for signing APKs, zipalign (wtf) and other crap just for a Hello World.

What would be nice to have is "installable" apps that use the webkit rendering engine but have full access to the system including directly opening TCP ports and direct access to /dev. These would have to be trusted apps obviously. Websites that load code without consent should be restricted, of course.

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> Every time I have to build a GUI in Linux I just build a webapp that connects to a TCP backend on localhost because that way I can just build a beautiful UI in HTML/JS/CSS and I don't have to deal with the mess that is GTK, QT, TCL, TK, and all that crap.

I suspect this has more to do with the state of native Linux development tools versus Javascript dev tools then it has to do with the general case. Dev tools for Windows and iOS/ MacOs are fairly straight forward. Not sure about Android, since my burning hatred of Java has removed my desire to mess with that platform entirely. (I know Kotlin exists, still not interested)

Update: I'm basing my comment of what it's like based on the quoted comment, not making an assertion about how good/ bad it is.

> Dev tools for Windows and iOS/ MacOs are fairly straight forward.

Can't speak much for Windows, but the Apple dev story is pretty good. Platform SDKs are deep and capable, if sometimes not well documented, and there's a clear "right" way to do most things. One can build a "world class" app with nothing but Swift+UIKit and few or no third party libraries. SwiftUI is rapidly improving this too, bringing a fully native "modern" reactive approach that works across all Apple OSes.

Xcode can be a cantankerous beast at times but it's been getting a lot better in recent releases.

> Not sure about Android, since my burning hatred of Java has removed my desire to mess with that platform entirely. (I know Kotlin exists, still not interested)

It's slowly improving but still very much a mess. Jetpack Compose looks to be poising itself as the SwiftUI of Android and that will no doubt improve things, but I have doubts that Android development will ever be as nice as iOS development is.

Well, IntelliJ Idea is a fantastically better IDE than XCode from a functionality standpoint, and Kotlin + Compose is IMHO, better than SwiftUI. Compose isn't a SwiftUI clone, it's a pure-functional memoization framework with compiler support.

> IntelliJ Idea is a fantastically better IDE than XCode from a functionality standpoint

This is not my experience, I've never quite cared for all the finicky setup needed to get things right, and it always feels a bit laggy. (Though IntelliJ is a world better than Eclipse).

It's definitely more laggy, but in terms of everything else, it's light years ahead of Xcode:

1) code navigation, editing, refactoring 2) integration with Git/GitHub, Issue Trackers, Cloud Providers 3) external build system support 4) multiplatform editing (java, js, typescript, kotlin, python, etc) 5) integration with testing, continuous integration, deployment 6) code analysis, finding problems 7) tons of special support for DSLs and third party frameworks

The only thing XCode is better at IMHO is UI building and OSX instrumentation. If you're writing tons of code that doesn't have a UI, especially for cloud backends, I don't think you'd use it.

Even simple things, like language injection, work wonders in the editor window. Having the IDE know how to syntax color, check, and code complete SQL, CSS, HTML, Regex, etc inside strings is a huge help.

I spend 15 years on emacs, and the last 15 on InteliJ, and having an editor that slices and dices code in a myriad a ways with easy to use automation, and actually indexes the code and builds a deeper understanding of the totality of your project is well worth it. I just wish it was less laggy in the UI.

If I was writing an iOS app, sure, I'd use XCode, but I can't envision being it general purpose for anything else, unlike the versatility of other competitors like VSCode.

> If I was writing an iOS app, sure, I'd use Xcode, but I can't envision being it general purpose for anything else, unlike the versatility of other competitors like VSCode.

I would never expect Xcode to be the best general purpose editor/ IDE. It's good for Swift/ iOS development which is what its build around. Personally, much of the time I'd rather have a performant editor than one that has a million bells and whistles.

> Dev tools for Windows and iOS/ MacOs are fairly straight forward

Are they? It's probably been a decade since I touched a native GUI (and I was without a mentor and working on already-old software) so I legitimately don't know. Using something like Visual Studio's form builder was fine enough, but it was not a very expressive toolset as I recall.

Web you can get started "instantly". Your browser covers most of the tooling you need and you can tweak any live site.

I don't like that that's how it is. From an abstract perspective I'd rather not be working on web because it seems like we're trying to make a better car by building a bicycle inside of it. But the low bar for entry is hard to beat.

I had to get back into C# a year or so ago to build a commercial internal production management application, WPF with XAML was exceptionally pleasant to work with and the final product just worked with few issues.

It felt weirdly like writing Vue-like code.

Microsoft nailed it imo, VS2017 and C# have come along way since I used to do .net 3.5 stuff.

I really liked C#, it’s http and a sync/await stuff was excellent.

> Web you can get started "instantly". Your browser covers most of the tooling you need and you can tweak any live site.

Obviously you can splat some HTML into a browser and get instant results, but once you start talking about apps with even moderate amounts of interaction, the simplicity of web apps falls away quickly. If you are talking about a sophisticated app, I don't think the complexity is any less when you are using javascript/ React versus Swift/ UIKit. The big win I've seen for javascript/ web apps is the fact that you are reasonably platform independent, obviously if you use Chrome and Chrome specific APIs, that falls away too.

Why not just use GTK or Qt?

GTK:

    import gi

    gi.require_version("Gtk", "3.0")
    from gi.repository import Gtk


    class MyWindow(Gtk.Window):
        def __init__(self):
            Gtk.Window.__init__(self, title="Hello World")

            self.button = Gtk.Button(label="Click Here")
            self.button.connect("clicked", self.on_button_clicked)
            self.add(self.button)

        def on_button_clicked(self, widget):
            print("Hello World")


    win = MyWindow()
    win.connect("destroy", Gtk.main_quit)
    win.show_all()
    Gtk.main()

HTML:

    <html><body>
      <button onclick="alert('Hello World')">Click Here</button>
    </body></html>

Now try implementing a swipe tab UI in GTK with animations and embedded video. In HTML you can probably import someone's awesome library .js file and be done with it in 5 minutes. Video is a snap. In GTK you have to deal with some idiotic factories, pipelines, sinks, faucets, and other god-knows-what abstractions. In HTML it's just <video>.

You could also use a glade file and only worry about functionality on the code itself. It's not too bad.

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