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Comment by CGamesPlay | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this is one of the under-appreciated reasons why the web is taking over desktop apps. It's so much easier to build a web app that runs with native extensions than it is to build a native app with almost any toolkit. Even if you only target a single platform (say, macOS, and excluding Windows/iOS/Android development), is there a single platform's GUI toolkit that can stack up to what you get in 10 minutes of setting up an electron app?

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That's certainly true, but consider how many tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars were spent until web development reached the state it is in today. And how many dead ends had to be explored before we had things like browser dev tools with integrated support for React. Think of all the frameworks that no one uses anymore, the abandoned bundlers, templates, entire languages like CoffeeScript, the list goes on and on.

The amount of brainpower invested in the web platform dwarfs what any native toolkit has been given. No wonder it's so good; it would have been a crazy waste of resources otherwise. I'm sure native toolkits would be just as user-friendly, or even better, if they had such lavish resources dedicated to improving them.

You also want to mention an additional reason: native toolkits have to be tested multiple times; once for windows, once for macos, once again for Linux and whatever else you want to support. Even if you get QT deployed for a Mac version, there's still no guarantee they look the same on Windows. Each platform has its own quirk.

With fewer developers working with these toolkits, we see less adoption, more issues, etc.

> I feel like this is one of the under-appreciated reasons why the web is taking over desktop apps. It's so much easier to build a web app that runs with native extensions than it is to build a native app with almost any toolkit.

I disagree. Microsoft's WPF to me feels like GUI development done right. Designing UI components is a first-class citizen and even has WYSIWYG support, rendering data with observers is also a first class citizen with it's data binding feature, styling is also supported right out of the box, etc.

In theory frameworks like React sound nice, but once developers start to pour hooks left and right and add conditionals and move service client calls into trees then at least to me it quickly becomes an unreadable and unmaintainable mess.

Qt is pretty good to setup a widget tree, but it's model-view implementation feels broken and not thought through, specially with tables and trees.

> Microsoft's WPF to me feels like GUI development done right

I really do enjoy working with WPF. I just wish Microsoft would give us clear directions on the state of UI development on Windows, whether WPF has a future or not. MAUI doesn't feel like it yet because it feels mobile-first.

Microsoft doesn't know either.

It's just Darwinism at work. OS vendors had *decades* to get their shit together and come up with a proper application model and UI system that's both easy to use and works across platforms. But to them, vendor lock-in was always more important, no wonder that application developers turned their back and found a solution that works better for them.

I see your point but I don’t know if I agree with your conclusion. Browser stuff is popular because we have been in a local minimum, where people (consumers) don’t want to pay for software. Native software did exist but only the big guys found success, ie Microsoft, and that was often because of the enterprise space. With the browser, networked applications came to the foreground, and also a sneaky way to make money which was trading the apps/services for their data. If you follow the money, this is why browser tools have gotten where they are. In the meanwhile, it’s not like native hasn’t been doing anything. There is the entire mobile space that cropped up in the meanwhile and it makes some people a lot of money. Also, most native tools and apps are actually miles better in some ways, eg developing apps for iOS, but not many developers know because the world (read: money) has become web in the meanwhile.

This probably won’t last btw. There is already backlash, people will start realizing that simply payinh for what you value is essentially a more direct way of voting for how you want the world to be, and business/technology will continue to follow the money.

Maybe a universal app container, like the web, but with native-like OS integrations will be the future, especially with future resource heavy technology on the horizon, like ML and AR/VR. But who knows?

Anyways, it’s not because os vendors don’t have their shit together. It’s because computing is still nascent and consumers have been cheap, so the revolution was funded elsewhere and that will of course change.

(Typed on my phone so sorry for typos)

xcode and swiftui is getting close. You can hover over visual elements and see the code, and vice versa. You can render the UI and modify layout and styles without compiling and launching a new instance of the app.

> Even if you only target a single platform (say, macOS, and excluding Windows/iOS/Android development), is there a single platform's GUI toolkit that can stack up to what you get in 10 minutes of setting up an electron app?

20 years old copy of Borland Delphi running on windows 95 machine will do that.

GTK + Workbench is pretty fast in my workflow (too bad I don't want to use GTK anymore).

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