Comment by johnbernier | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnbernier | Hacker News Reader

What happened is naturally growth. There are more developers today then ever before, corresponding to the rise in the global population. As there are more and more developers, there is an associated rise in the number of people wanting to get into making desktop GUI applications. Most people don't know desktop frameworks like QT and Swing, so new people coming into the application development space are going to make applications in what they know: HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

Yet even as this happens and HTML/CSS/JavaScript rises that doesn't mean that there is a decline in the making of desktop applications. I think that desktop applications made with native technologies are being built as much as ever, its just that the industry as a whole has grown to accommodate the vast influx of new HTML/CSS/JavaScript developers. For example, my favorite applications are build in Swing (IntelliJ and related projects) or in QT.

> Just for completeness I should mention Linux, it is the best computing platform to happen to the world and should be admired in every way – except one! the desktop/UI sucks, its awful in almost every way

I say that KDE is awesome. So that is just your opinion, and not everyone agrees.

> Developing desktop apps in 2022 is essentially an HTML/CSS/JavaScript endeavour

That does not follow.

> the performance of a well written UI in a modern browser out-performs a native desktop application in every category of sped, usability and presentation for most usual use cases.

That is not my experience. Visual Studio Code doesn't seem to run as smoothly as I would like. Meanwhile every C++/QT application I have run works perfectly. Where are you getting this from?

Qt is lowkey quite great, I just wish they hadn't thrown away their market share...

WSJT-X is a cross-platform QT app. It is multi-threaded, processes audio in close to real time, talks to devices over serial interfaces, interoperates with other apps over UDP and TCP connections. It starts fast, and has a pretty small memory footprint (around 80 MB) and was literally written (largely) by amateurs.

OTOH, it is not a beautiful, lovely app. The UI does look like 1999. But it works fabulously.

(ref https://sourceforge.net/projects/wsjt/)

> That is not my experience. Visual Studio Code doesn't seem to run as smoothly as I would like. Meanwhile every C++/QT application I have run works perfectly. Where are you getting this from?

I’m in a bit of a unique position where I work on both a Qt app using Qt Creator and a React app using VS Code. Qt Creator has crashed on me numerous times, has slower initial loads, regularly has weird visual bugs, and is overall much less enjoyable to use.

I develop on a modern windows computer. Maybe Qt Creator performance wins against VS Code on Linux? In my experience, VS Code does not perform as well on Linux as it does on Windows or OSX.

I've recently tried QT creator and it was hard to get working at first, but once I did it didn't have any problems or visual bugs for me. Overall it seems to be working pretty great, but rather or not you have issues depends upon your install, what version you are using, what operating system your are using, etc. So who knows.

But I think that QT creator should have a faster initial load then Visual Studio Code, because the later has to open up an entire browser render-er to work. QT creator opens instantly on my system, but visual studio code lags for a second. The weird visual bugs might indicate something else wrong with your system which is messing up the program. A picture might help us to find what the bug is so we can fix it if there is a serious problem with QT creator.

As for the less enjoyable to use thing, there isn't much I can do about that. Visual studio code is probably more fun to use, and React isn't too bad either. Using React can be a joyful experience indeed. But enjoyment issues aside, I think that a good C++/QT based application should have a performance advantage over one made with HTML/CSS/JavaScript and Electron. Visual studio code can be more enjoyable but still perform slightly less well, because it doesn't have to make a difference to the end user that it does things a couple milliseconds slower.

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