Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aleman360 | Hacker News Reader

I'd still choose to use C++ or C# for cross-platform code if starting from scratch.

However, I've never had to work on cross-platform apps, and have never been subjected to JavaScript professionally, so my opinion is probably worthless.

View on HN

Xamarin would probably be the framework/tool of choice if you want C#. Other than that, most (popular) cross-platform app development frameworks I've found do use JavaScript. "Disclaimer": I'm in the middle of writing a thesis on the subject.

Since you're writing a thesis on cross-platform frameworks, have you looked at the toolchain that Google used for Inbox? They write their cross-platform non-UI code in Java. On Android, that's native. For iOS, they compile it to Objective-C using a tool they wrote called J2ObjC. For the browser app, they use GWT. The UI code is platform-specific and written in each platform's native language, i.e. Java, ObjC, and JS. They don't even try for cross-platform UI code, as Ray Cromwell explained here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8965349

This toolchain doesn't cover UWP, except indirectly via UWP's support for web apps.

So why did you say C# and C+= are a much better fit for XAML? Because they're the languages that Microsoft officially supports? Any other reasons?

Official support, documentation, perf (presumably), debugging, and tooling support would be my main concerns.

Technically, XAML makes heavy use of C#'s events and properties (which C++\Cx adds to C++), which don't exist in plain old JavaScript. Also, both C# and C++\Cx support "await" natively, which is extremely nice for WinRT's async-heavy API's.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com