Comment by gameenginz8 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gameenginz8 | Hacker News Reader

I’ve often wondered why more desktop software and data analysis stuff isn’t written in something like Unreal.

- optimized across platforms - optimized net code libs - modal collaboration tool: build in blueprints or code (basically web components before web components) - advanced visualization - source control integration - the frontend can be backend language agnostic, swap C++ for Rust over time - no web assembly needed - heavily polished ergonomics and UX - custom input map support is robust, tools can have their own keymap (we aren’t secretaries!)

The tech world at large is really addicted to the toolkits of the wrong companies, IMO

Apples “pro” dev tool in Xcode feels like a boring business tool.

Once closed desktop tools are now free for development with a market for making money now. Godot is just as open as Visual Studio or Firefox, minus the DOM, JavaScript, etc.

Cloud infra and micro services can still be what they are, all the usual safety features.

Web/mobile development landscape just feels bloated and insane compared to building once in Unreal or Godot and outputting to multiple platforms like the game engines are doing.

Because the overhead and complexity is huge and useless. Unreal is not optimized to make GUI application, it's used to make games. Engines don't have anything useful to make modern app on the desktop.

The overhead and complexity of a dozen different IDEs, JS frameworks, 4 browsers, 2 mobile phone platforms, etc etc is less complex?

In a day to day engineering perspective it’s all a mess of abstraction and indirection anyway?

If we’re going to optimize ONE stack, I’d prefer the one with all the optimized rendering and input mapping, rather than hacking that all into a bloated document parser like we’re hacking into a browser?

IMO that is textbook functional fixedness.

For one applications need familiarity and uniformity. Games don't. For example games have exactly zero accessibility support, system actually knowing about what is being rendered is quite useful for it to provide tools like voice over. What about IME?

> If we’re going to optimize ONE stack

Why would we though? There are different classes of applications and there are multiple platforms with different conventions. Different use cases require different tools. Every time something "to rule them all" was tried, multiple niche tools grown around.

> For example games have exactly zero accessibility support, system actually knowing about what is being rendered is quite useful for it to provide tools like voice over.

Some engines do have accessibility support. Most games don't do accessibility because it costs money. Same as web apps, by the way. It is not a technical limitation.

> What about IME?

What about it? It works just fine in any proper engine. There are a lot of non-Latin-charset speakers in the world...

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