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Comment by lazarus101 | Hacker News Reader

In most cases it's either an Electron app or no desktop app at all. It's simply not feasible to write native apps.

Why not? People do native mobile apps despite those platforms being more or less at parity, while desktops are overwhelmingly just one platform. The tools to write cross platform mobile apps that aren't just a browser with lipstick (like xamarin) exist for both desktop and desktop.

Then don't, it's really wasteful to have webdevs write desktop apps using Electron. I don't see a gain over using a webpage. I use slack this way and I don't see any problems.

You might not necessarily want something like code-editors rely on external servers, while still taking advantage of the UX of web-development.

VSCode gets around this by running an npm node locally.

No one would bother writing Electron app if there was no demand. Most users, (even tech savvy users) prefer using Electron Slack instead of keeping the webapp open in a browser.

Qt exists and is really nice to work with. It has multiple language bindings. How is it unfeasible?

Development time needed to create desktop apps (for Windows, Mac and Linux) given that there's already an existing webapp:

- using Electron: 1 month

- using QT: 2 years

Chrome apps would have solved one of the main problems if they were still a thing (does anyone know why chrome deprecated them?).

(by reusing the chrome context, your memory usage wouldn't grow unnecessarily for each new slack/spotify/whatever you open).

> does anyone know why chrome deprecated them?

To push Chrome OS (where they will still be available) and to vendor lock-in people with Android apps.

Quite the opposite, they wanted to prevent vendor lock-in, so they pushed for standards like service workers and NaCL that eliminate the need for Chrome Apps.

But aren't those two only for getting better performance for web apps? Chrome Apps actually help getting a web app integrated into the OS, I don't see where (P)NaCl helps me with that.

Progressive web apps can be launched in a window just like a Chrome app.

I was just trying to look into this, I can't see a way for this to happen on a desktop, is my google-fu broken or is coming later. I was also looking for a desktop icon (or file or whatever).

Yep, I hate that all of these companies try to convert their applications from tabs to dedicated processes. It would be a huge deal breaker if Chrome Apps could become a thing and replace them. Now I have 4 different Chrome apps running on my computer.

Chrome Apps aren't different from tabs, though.

My point was they could convert their web applications to Chrome Apps which has better native api support and experience if Chrome Apps could become a thing.

They were deprecated because they aren't really necessary anymore now that you have things like service workers and NaCL. Never worked on mobile, too.

Progressive Web Apps is where it's at.

So I've liked what I've heard about Progressive web apps, but I was wondering if there is a solution for desktop? can you create a native icon that opens a new window with a PWA?

> It has multiple language bindings.

Not many of them are good though, as it's hard to bind C++.

If you want to work with Qt, C++ is really the best option. And not many people know that language well enough. They know JavaScript though ;)

Software/web devs are such hypocrites, optimising software for production and not for the platform or the user.

That's the entire rationale behind e.g. using python or php on the backend. Oh, the requests are IO-bound, we don't need to use a cumbersome language like C++ or Java to develop our backend, we'll just throw more cores at it if it gets too slow. Developer time will always be the first thing to be optimised, not least because the first to ship win and the first to ship is the one with the fastest development stack.

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