> native UI libraries need to step up their game in terms of approachability.
Gnome does this, you can develop apps in Typescript.
But, they started to migrate some of their own apps to Typescript and immediately received backlash from the community [0]. Although granted, the Phoronix forums can be quite toxic.
My observation is that there is just a big disconnect between younger devs who just want to get the job done, and the more old-school community that care about resource efficients. Both are good intentions that I can understand, but they clash badly. This unfortunately hinders progress on this point.
I agree that this is, at least often, a case of where your roots lie.
Whats most shocking to me is that the likes of Apple and Mircosoft don't seem to be interested in/capable of building an actually good framework.
I feel like Microsoft tried with .NET Maui, but that really isn't a viable choice if you go by developer sentiment.
It is more a side effect of JavaScript bootcamp programming wihtout learning anything else.
I have been coding since 1986, nowadays most of the UIs I get paid to work on are Web based, yet when I want to have fun in side projects I only code for native UIs, if a GUI is needed.
Want to code like VB and Delphi? Plenty of options available, and yes they do scalable layouts, just like they used to do already back in the 1990's for anyone that actually bothered to read the programming manuals.
Yes, I've dabbled in gtk, wxWidgets and several other systems. All of them are meh.
The big player these days seems to be web-based (Electron and friends), though the JVM stack with a native theme for Win/Mac is certainly usable in an environment where you can rely on Java being around.
I think the best option would be some kind of cross-application client-side HTML etc. renderer that apps could use for their user interaction. We could call it a "browser". That avoids the problem of 10 copies of the whole electron stack for 10 apps.
Years ago, Microsoft had their own version of this called HTA (HTml Application) where you could delegate UI to the built-in browser (IE) and get native-looking controls. Something like that but cross-platfom would be nice, especially as one motivation for this project is that Chrome apps are no longer supported so "Web Server for Chrome" is going away. So the "like electron but most of the overhead is handled by Chrome" option is actively being discontinued.
LeonM|10 months ago
Gnome does this, you can develop apps in Typescript.
But, they started to migrate some of their own apps to Typescript and immediately received backlash from the community [0]. Although granted, the Phoronix forums can be quite toxic.
My observation is that there is just a big disconnect between younger devs who just want to get the job done, and the more old-school community that care about resource efficients. Both are good intentions that I can understand, but they clash badly. This unfortunately hinders progress on this point.
[0] https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoron...
8-prime|10 months ago
I agree that this is, at least often, a case of where your roots lie. Whats most shocking to me is that the likes of Apple and Mircosoft don't seem to be interested in/capable of building an actually good framework.
I feel like Microsoft tried with .NET Maui, but that really isn't a viable choice if you go by developer sentiment.
pjmlp|10 months ago
I have been coding since 1986, nowadays most of the UIs I get paid to work on are Web based, yet when I want to have fun in side projects I only code for native UIs, if a GUI is needed.
Want to code like VB and Delphi? Plenty of options available, and yes they do scalable layouts, just like they used to do already back in the 1990's for anyone that actually bothered to read the programming manuals.
red_admiral|10 months ago
The big player these days seems to be web-based (Electron and friends), though the JVM stack with a native theme for Win/Mac is certainly usable in an environment where you can rely on Java being around.
I think the best option would be some kind of cross-application client-side HTML etc. renderer that apps could use for their user interaction. We could call it a "browser". That avoids the problem of 10 copies of the whole electron stack for 10 apps.
Years ago, Microsoft had their own version of this called HTA (HTml Application) where you could delegate UI to the built-in browser (IE) and get native-looking controls. Something like that but cross-platfom would be nice, especially as one motivation for this project is that Chrome apps are no longer supported so "Web Server for Chrome" is going away. So the "like electron but most of the overhead is handled by Chrome" option is actively being discontinued.
brulard|10 months ago
I think Tauri is trying to go for this - a web app without the whole chromium bundled, but using a native web view