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Comment by tobr | Hacker News Reader

> Closed-sourced native UI is a fragile place compared to the predictable JavaScript runtime of the browser.

Huh, that sounds contrary to what people usually tout as a benefit of native. You always hear about framework churn and cross-platform problems when it comes to JavaScript. Maybe that’s not so true anymore?

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Just don't use frameworks, or use the stable ones.

I use React and it had exactly one significant major change (class components -> functions & hooks) since 10 years ago when I started out with the beta release.

Windows went through 4 different "recommended" GUI frameworks and many more major API changes during that time.

That was a particularly crazy time for Windows UI development!

Native on other systems, perhaps. But for MacOS it's common that half your apps will break if you update as soon as the update is available. Got to give each developer time to fix their app first..

In this OP compared the runtime, not frameworks. In my experience the web platform is extremely stable.

JS, as bad as it might be is close to 100% backward compatible, your project will work forever on newer browsers, that can't be said for Apple.

Also goes in the other way. We can literally only support iOS 17 because we’re using SwiftUI and Apple refuses to backport anything, whereas in JavaScript you can generally use new APIs while either gracefully failing or triggering a fallback

That's because of the dynamic nature of JavaScript, you could do that in Swift too but that'd be a lot of dynamic dispatch for a static language...

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