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Ask HN: Good languages for closed-source desktop apps

15 points| bendmorris | 15 years ago | reply

Just wanted to get some opinions on this - if your goal is to write closed source, cross platform desktop apps, what are some good languages to consider?

I'm looking for a high-level, efficient language, but it needs to be able to compile to machine code. For example, while I love Python, I would eliminate it here because an app "frozen" by cx_freeze or py2exe can be decompiled into source without too much effort.

51 comments

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[+] nostrademons|15 years ago|reply
I would give up on "cross platform" desktop apps and use whatever the native language is for the platform. For Windows, that's C#/.NET. For Mac, Objective C/Cocoa. For Linux, probably C/Gtk or C++/Qt.

The problem with cross-platform apps is that you end up programming to the least common denominator of the platforms you support, and your app never has the performance or look & feel that users expect. Contrast: uTorrent vs. Azureus, iChat vs. Pidgin, TextMate vs. jEdit, etc. In a hyper-competitive desktop space, that often means death. Giant companies like IBM (Eclipse) or Mozilla (Firefox) can get away with it because the scale of what they're doing is very difficult for a small startup to replicate, but most micro-ISVs can't.

Yes, this is one reason why developing desktop apps sucks.

[+] jfb|15 years ago|reply
And it's not like Firefox or Eclipse (or Photoshop, to pick a commercial example) feels anything like a first-class citizen on the Macintosh. I'm not sure that there's much of a percentage in making cross-platform apps, really. The platform idioms and user expectations are just too different. Pick one platform and do a kick-ass job.

EDIT: Brain-fart: Firefox != Mozilla.

[+] andrewtbham|15 years ago|reply
I agree with everything nostrademons is saying, cross platfrom apps are bad. I did some java desktop apps about 4 or 5 years ago and the ui was awful. i think it's gotten a little better... but still, native app is going to look far superior.
[+] bendmorris|15 years ago|reply
You make a good point with regards to the native look. Is this really done in practice, creating different versions of the same app to target different platforms? Not only would that require duplicating the code, but in my case I'm familiar with .NET and C++ but have never touched Objective C. It seems like it would make the most sense then to only target Windows, which is something I'm reluctant to do (I'm a Linux guy at heart.)
[+] patio11|15 years ago|reply
If you put a gun to my head and told me "Write another desktop app", I'd tell you "Java", but you'd have to put a gun to my head. Balsamiq has also sold me on AIR. Unless you have a specific business requirement for it being on the desktop, though, the web overwhelmingly favors your interests as a businessman.

Thoughts on this at length are on my blog -- and if anything, a year later I believe everything here more strongly: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/09/05/desktop-aps-versus-web-a...

With specific reference to decompiling your source code: it doesn't matter, because a) your application will be pirated anyhow and b) there is no difference to the end user the mechanism by which the pirated version works. Also, you shouldn't be worried about piracy unless you're selling to twenty-something white and Asian males, in which case piracy is one of many business-sinking problems you have. (If you're really worried about piracy, can I recommend web apps again, or at the least an integrated server component? Pirating the client lets you pirate the application like downloading Firefox lets you pirate Basecamp.)

[+] mahmud|15 years ago|reply
Pretty much. Java + Eclipse + SWT. In our case it's swing because I don't wanna mess with 100% portability since we're doing webstart.

Eclipse makes Java feel "dynamic" since it auto-compiles with every keystroke. Brilliant stuff, really.

Having said that, our server side will remain in 100% Common Lisp on the JVM. Since it's the part that sees near daily updates, unlike the client GUI which is code and forget.

[+] bendmorris|15 years ago|reply
Your article was an excellent read, so thanks for the link. I generally agree with a lot of what you're saying.

My potential audience is pretty targeted - mainly research scientists and possibly some government workers. They'll likely be more computer savvy than the average user (on average, at least - some scientists I know are just as bad as Grandma.) What I worry about in considering a web app is:

1 - People want to be able to run the software anywhere, any time, without a connection to the internet.

2 - When entering large amounts of data, which is potentially sensitive, into an application, it seems like people would trust a desktop app more.

Number 2 is subjective, but as a scientist myself, I would feel better about a program running on my own machine.

Any thoughts?

[+] Zak|15 years ago|reply
Have you worked with any non-Java JVM languages? I can understand your recommendation of the platform for this use case, but the Java language itself seems like a lot of extra pain for minimal gain over Scala or Clojure.
[+] gdl|15 years ago|reply
Machine code can be decompiled too, even if not as cleanly. It would slow down efforts to make an unauthorized fork of the software as a whole, but anyone curious enough about individual bits and pieces could still see exactly what's happening. Closed source is really more of a legal block than a technical one.

Given that and the lack of popular, high-level languages that compile to machine code (C++ is the best I can come up with), I'd reconsider whether that's really a priority.

[+] bendmorris|15 years ago|reply
True that any program can be reverse engineered. But for example with Python, you're not just handing them the program, but also the bytecode, which can be turned into source without spending much time. This gives a lot more information much faster.

I would prefer something like C++ which is about as obfuscated as you're going to get, but I'm curious if there are any higher level options that would save programming time.

[+] ecommando|15 years ago|reply
I personally like C#.

If you use Gtk for the GUI, it's cross platform using Mono. Lots of closed and open source widgets, easy to write your own, and runs very quickly.

IMHO, the networking stack in C# is much more robust and provides better performance than in Java, and you can static link the runtimes to the app, making deployment of installer-free apps relatively easy using embedded resources.

Cheers! Randy

[+] cookiecaper|15 years ago|reply
High-level languages are hard to obfuscate. If you're going for difficulty in decompilation, you're pretty much stuck to low-level, non-interpreted languages.

.NET and Java are your best bets for relatively high-level desktop languages that are hard to decompile because since they're so widely used, obfuscation techniques are more advanced. But really if you want to create a difficult-to-decompile program, I think you're pretty much stuck with C or other non-interpreted, low-level languages (maybe try D?).

[+] malkia|15 years ago|reply
LispWorks with CAPI, here is some software written with it: http://weitz.de/regex-coach/ http://www.netfonds.no/manual_pt_eng.php http://lisp.ystok.ru/ygrid/index.html or check on their page - http://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/index.html I've started doing some small Perforce p4win clone in it - github.com/malkia/p4bee - it contains source code and binaries.
[+] mahmud|15 years ago|reply
He might need to take a year off to master Common Lisp though.

Dunno, a year off sounds nice, but you don't need to wait that long to be competitive. Better find a GUI and an obfuscation solution for a language you already know now, than to dick around with new languages when you have a product to finish and ship.

If I must. I would do the app in Python or whatever, then spend 2-3 weeks designing my own custom loader. Some C-based stub code packer that load a python interpreter as a shared library then my code. Wrap everything up with some compression and verify integrity with some crypto.

Nearly every embedded scripting language can be shoe-horned with custom packer like this that looks a lot like Java's ClassLoader. If you want to take this to its engineering extreme, you might even be able to get remote binary update functionality, by fetching packed tarballs of new code from your server, after the necessary key exchange.

[+] yawniek|15 years ago|reply
Why not use cython and do only the sensitive stuff in c?

It is really interesting that the gui problem still isn't solved after so many years. Personally i think microsoft made the right thing by really decoupling design from code. I'm not using windows tough...

[+] mfinas|15 years ago|reply
Freepascal + Lazarus for win/mac/linux desktop apps, if you dig pascal language.
[+] pshc|15 years ago|reply
Haskell is high-level, fast, and its optimized machine code would be nigh impossible to decompile in my opinion. Unfortunately it'd be a bit of a stretch to write a large GUI app in Haskell at this point...
[+] wtracy|15 years ago|reply
I know there's GTk+ bindings for Haskell. I don't know if there's any others.

Can anyone comment on the quality of the GTk+ bindings, or the existence of any other bindings?

I have enough experience with GTk+ from C and Python to say that it creates really nice, snappy UIs under Linux, but it's really hard to make it "feel right" under Windows, and pretty much impossible to make it "feel right" under OS X. On those platforms, it will almost always stand out the same way that Java apps do.

I'll also say that Haskell, while awesome, is a PITA to learn.

[+] bendmorris|15 years ago|reply
Why would it be a stretch? (I've never been exposed to Haskell before.)
[+] woan|15 years ago|reply
If it's for Windows only WPF/Silverlight in C# is probably the most productive platform.
[+] andrewtbham|15 years ago|reply
if you do go with the java desktop app, use the absolute layout. those complex layouts were very difficult to change.
[+] gte910h|15 years ago|reply
Python + Titanium from Appcelerator

Air

Python + QT

[+] mahmud|15 years ago|reply
PyQt is nice, but damn, the other two are ugly slow dogs.

I just removed Air yesterday, and Appcelerator needs a bit more work.

[+] alexkay|15 years ago|reply
> I'm a Linux guy at heart

If you are going to use GTK+, take a look at Vala [1]. It's a C#-like language which is compiled into C. Much saner than coding in C. You can easily port your app to Windows/OSX, but, as others noted, non-native UI will be far from perfect.

I'm using this approach in an open-source project of mine [2], feel free to borrow the ideas.

[1] http://live.gnome.org/Vala

[2] http://www.spek-project.org/