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Comment by icedrift | Hacker News Reader

It is tragic that the only robust solution for cross platform apps eats up so much memory and storage but we're getting to the point where it's not that big a deal.

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Java and .Net/Avalonia are right there... Electron is not the only cross platform solution.

While .NET has the cross-platform-vm thing going, is not particularly suited to cross-platform rendering. The web is. And don't get me started on WPF.

That's why I mentioned https://avaloniaui.net/ which does the part. WPF is not bad compared to everything happening in the web frameworks.

I disagree. After working with WPF for a while, I'd prefer almost anything from the frontend world (except React) over WPF. Avalonia is nice though.

Is WPF cross-plaform?

* WPF: Windows-only.

* MAUI: Windows, macOS, Android, iOS.

* Avalonia: Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS, browsers.

I can remember when the rhetoric against Java apps being "slow" was just as strong as it is against Electron now. And they've always been less native-feeling and clunkier than Electron.

Java is a ferrari when compared to Electron.

How so? I know there are theoretical arguments and microbenchmarks that Java might be faster than JavaScript, but I've never seen an actual user-facing GUI app in Java that felt smoother to use than good Electron apps.

Electron shifted the scales to below the old Java while Java improved. It's still not great, but given a choice? Let Electron die.

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