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Comment by kitsunesoba | Hacker News Reader

Just because it's the best we have (if you're looking for a cross platform solution, anyway) doesn't mean that we've reached the peak and can just quit. We can do a hell of a lot better, and doing anything less is tragically underselling ourselves. There are no laws of physics preventing a better solution from existing. No, creating something better isn't easy, but neither have any of the other technological breakthroughs.

HTML/JS/CSS is just a stepping stone like any other, not an endgame. Don't grow complacent with it. Demand something better.

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> it's the best we have (if you're looking for a cross platform solution, anyway)

No it's not. If you want a fast full-featured cross-platform GUI toolkit, there are many: GTK+ and Qt are especially great, and have bindings for several languages.

I can't speak for Qt, but GTK+ is not that great outside of the Linux bubble. IMHO, of course.

They aren't that great in the Linux bubble.

I say that from the developer and the user perspective.

Qt is not that fun either, at least two years ago. Old style class hierarchies, clunky abstractions and awful build step (QMAKE). It got better with the use of lambdas, no longer necessary to have class to connect to a signal, lambda works as well.

However QML is an improvement. It was a bit quirky to get render the way you wanted and it was not native & look and feel, but maybe have gotten better since I used it. I could imagine that TypeScript + QML could be quite pleasant. Big downside is that the install size of your program is quite big.

Qt isn't native. They're drawing their own widgets that look close to native - that's why you can theme Qt apps.

Factually incorrect, since Qt uses native widgets when possible. Applying Qt stylesheets usually disables use of the operating system's styling engine, i.e. only then Qt starts drawing the widgets by itself. Widgets that are not part of the native widget assortment are drawn by Qt.

Then what is this blog post about? https://blog.qt.io/blog/2017/02/06/native-look-feel/

Qt Quick Controls which has nothing to with QtWidgets.

> Posted in Dev Loop, Qt Quick Controls, Styles

"Quitting" is not how I'd describe Atom and VS Code.

You might not like the envelope they are pushing, but they are cutting-edge explorations into web tech, coinciding with other cutting-edge developments like HTML/JS -> Native interfaces.

Are they really cutting edge? Or are they just an excuse to cram more javascript and web tech into unrelated areas.

Just because js is good on web, doesn't - and shouldn't - mean that we should be doing that.

There are now many more expressive languages which compile to HTML, CSS and JS. We are 'stuck' with these 3 technologies that are still very functional and we should just embrace them as the low level language of UIs.

Of the 3, javascript is the most dispensable, there's nothing stopping us writing platforms which have UIs designed in HTML/CSS but have a DOM controlled by python/c#/ruby.

I was not suggesting we stop progressing, but we need to recognise the phenomenal amount of overhead involved in replacing these 3 technologies. What benefit would be served when they can just be abstracted on top of, at least with regards to the web?

Case in point, Assembly Language, we could theoretically replace the standards that have been reached over decades of collaboration with something more suited to our modern leanings. But what would be the point, when we've long since abstracted it out of our minds?

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