zlacker

>>meetpa+(OP)
It is baffling how these AI companies, with billions of dollars, cannot build native applications, even with the help of AI. From a UI perspective, these are mostly just chat apps, which are not particularly difficult to code from scratch. Before the usual excuses come about how it is impossible to build a custom UI, consider software that is orders of magnitude more complex, such as raddbg, 10x, Superluminal, Blender, Godot, Unity, and UE5, or any video game with a UI. On top of that, programs like Claude Cowork or Codex should, by design, integrate as deeply with the OS as possible. This requires calling native APIs (e.g., Win32), which is not feasible from Electron.

>>Olympi+EJ
The situation for Desktop development is nasty. Microsoft had so many halfassed frameworks and nobody knows which one to use. It’s probably the de facto platform on Windows IS Electron, and Microsoft use them often, too.

On MacOS is much better. But most of the team either ended up with locked in Mac-only or go cross platform with Electron.

>>namelo+FQ
I guess it shows how geriatric I am with desktop app development these days, but does no one use Qt anymore? Wasn't the dream for that to be a portable and native platform to write GUI apps? Presumably that could abstract away which bullshit Microsoft framework they came out with this week.

I haven't touched desktop application programming in a very long time and I have no desire to ever do so again after trying to learn raw GTK a million years ago, so I'm admittedly kind of speaking out of my ass here.

>>tomber+H22
Qt means C++. I'll take Typescript over C++ for a GUI task any day.

Qt is also pretty memory-hungry; maybe rich declarative (QML) skinnable adaptable UIs with full a11y support, etc just require some RAM no matter what. And it also looks a wee bit "non-native" to purists, except on Windows, where the art of uniform native look is lost.

Also, if you ever plan extensions / plugin support, you already basically have it built-in.

Yes, a Qt-based program may be wonderfully responsive. But an Electron-based app can be wonderfully responsive, too. And both can feel sluggish, even on great hardware. It all depends on a right architecture, on not doing any (not even "guaranteed fast") I/O in the GUI thread, mostly. This takes a bit of skill and, most importantly, consideration; both are in short supply, as usual.

The biggest problem with Electron apps is their size. Tauri, which relies on the system-provided web view component, is the reasonable way.