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Comment by Strom | Hacker News Reader

What even is "native" on Windows? Is it Win32? WinForms? WPF? UWP? WinUI? Windows App SDK? There's so many to choose from and they all look and behave differently.

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Win32, WinForms, WPF are as good as it gets, and really the only ones that matter.

UWP is deprecated, althought it keeps being the one mostly used on Windows 11, as WinUI still isn't up to its game and keeps collecting issues across all their repos.

Windows App SDK is not a GUI framework, rather the new marketing name for Project Reunion, the porting of UWP runtime infrastructure on top of standard COM without sandoxing and application identity.

Do you know which of those toolkits is used for the new Windows 11 Notepad? It's quite a bit more "laggy" to scroll in than the old Notepad that's still on the Server edition.

The old notepad was Win32, the new one is WinUI, there you have it, how good WinUI is in its current state.

https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-11/260092/hands-on-...

These days the native GUI for Windows is Electron.

Not quite, WebView2, which has the benefit of not dragging Chrome with every single application.

Many of those are native enough, meaning they inherit the style from the desktop (and not just emulate it), do they support accessibility and so on.

For example, QtWidgets is native and qml is not. WxWidgets is, electron is not.

Any of those will do as long as you don't drag in javascript crap.

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