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 is still used, but I think part of the reason it is less used is that C++ isn't always the right language anymore for building GUI application.

That’s actually why we're working on Slint (https://slint.dev): It's a cross-platform native UI toolkit where the UI layer is decoupled from the application language, so you can use Rust, JavaScript, Python, etc. for the logic depending on what fits the project better.

>>ogoffa+Mr2
How can C++ not be the "right" language? It seems to meet all the requirements for event-driven GUIs - event handlers are function callbacks after all...

>>72delu+zs2
C++ works, but compared to other languages it's often no longer the most productive choice for UI work. Modern UI code is mostly glue and state management, where fast iteration matters more than squeezing out maximum performance. And when performance does matter, there are also newer, safer languages.

For teams comfortable with C++ or with existing C++ libraries to integrate, it can of course still be a strong choice, just not the preferred one for most current teams.

>>ogoffa+ME2
But desktop C++ isn't difficult or slow to write...

It seems odd to me that the software world has gone in the direction of "quick to write - slow to run". It should be the other way around. Things of quality (eg. paintings by Renaissance masters) took time to create, despite being quick to observe.

It also seems proven that releasing software quickly ("fast iteration") doesn't lead to quality - see how many releases of the YouTube app or Netflix there are on iOS or Android; if speedy releases are important, it is valuing rush to production over quality, much like a processed food version of edible content.

In a world that is also facing energy issues, sluggish and inefficient performance should be shunned, not welcomed?

I suppose this mentality is endemic, and why we see a raft of cruddy slow software these days, where upcoming developers ("current teams") no longer value performance over ease of their job. It can only get worse if the "it's good enough" mentality persists. It's quite sad.

>>72delu+MH2
The part that takes time in UI isn’t wiring up components, it’s the small changes like something is a pixel to the right or that gap is two pixels wide. Changing those in a C++ project means recompiling and that adds up to significant overhead over a day of polishing the UI. If C++ was able to get builds out in less than a second, this wouldn’t be an issue. People value performance in their own tools more than the tools of their customer.

>>pitche+CX2
In wxWidgets you use sizers, so you don't work on pixel-level alignments. I can understand if you're using an ancient framework like MFC, but even then I seem to recall there was a sizer equivalent system (or it is easy enough to write a class to do so, moving components).

I think it is a daft thing to move to shipping a colossal web framework and entire browser simply because of 1px UI alignments (which have been a solved problem for decades in C++ anyway).