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Comment by Klonoar | Hacker News Reader

This is the kind of project where the death of “native” as a term is sad.

You’re not truly native if you’re using egui, you’re just a step above Electron & co. TablePlus is actually native and it shows.

If you’re vibe coding this shit, why can’t you just tell it to output platform specific things?

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It's native in that it doesn't start a whole web browser with hooks to native code, like most cross-platform applications. That saves a lot of RAM and storage (unless you're willing to subject yourself to testing with each platform's web view, which brings its own problems to the table for minimal benefit).

Based on the description, it looks like the author is using Linux. Native doesn't really exist there. There are a couple of flavours, but none of them are any more native than the other, and none of them are much more native than just rendering the UI yourself.

Modern Windows and Android development also often use the very same technique. Old Win32 (and I presume macOS, though the rise of iPad apps on macOS make me start to wonder) still offer some native-ish controls but they're not usable outside of their own platforms.

With egui you don't need to actually run a full copy of every version of Windows and macOS to see if the program runs. If it compiles, it'll work.

Actually I use macOS primarily but I use Linux for my VPSs and home server of course. I should probably test it on there.

TablePlus is notoriously not that great on Windows due to not being as platform agnostic.

I wanted to make this as platform agnostic as possible while being ultra performant. TablePlus is awesome on macOS, not so awesome on other platforms. Let's bridge that gap and make it open source and free.

I wouldn't say it's just a step above electron, I think the term "native" has always been a little overloaded in this way. For example, a game that uses egui for the HuD/menus could be rightly called native compared to a web game.

You're talking about "native controls", which is more specific. That said, I don't see any reason why egui would be used over native controls for this type of app. They probably just didn't think to ask their AI.

I imagine with AI, something like libui-ng would be pretty easy to improve and maintain. Looks like development has stalled though.

> You're talking about "native controls", which is more specific.

No, I am using "native" the way we used it before everyone starting rendering directly to the GPU. You can go back years on HN to see how it was used if you're confused.

Well I can only remember back to 2008 or so, but since then the term has always been somewhat overloaded. Did I sound confused in my comment?

My understanding of native is also that it's essentially natively compiled to the platform, not that it's necessarily using platform native UI.

The goal here with this project is to be platform agnostic. TablePlus due to being developed for macOS is much worse on other platforms than on macOS where it shines.

I wanted to bring the same experience but make it platform agnostic.

Language changes.

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