Comment by dannysu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dannysu | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I find that complaining about something without providing suggestions to be unproductive. It's very easy to complain and say things are bad. Anyone can do that.

There are reasons why people are doing things this way. Just like the discussion of why people have 1000+ tabs. You could try to understand the underlying reasons vs just criticize.

What would you rather people do? Code it in Qt? Code it in Java? Code it for each platform specifically? If so, why aren't people doing that?

I value cross-platform support greatly because I run Linux on desktop, Windows on laptop, and I have a Mac Mini as well.

I use Moneydance [1] as my personal finance tracking software. It's written in Java for cross-platform support. I use it on Linux and on Windows. If it was written in Electron, I'd still use it. Why? Cross-platform support is important to me.

  [1]: http://moneydance.com/

That's an interesting example, because I really want a Quicken alternative, but I didn't go with Moneydance in part because of the Java requirement. I don't want to be constantly patching yet another insecure runtime. Bundling Java with the app is better from a usability perspective, but then I can't be sure if they're keeping it patched, and it's still a non-native & bloated experience.

I value cross-platform too, and there are lots of native apps that manage that without Electron or Java. From my toolkit I can see Sublime Edit (of course), also Photoshop, Affinity Photo, Renoise, Melodyne, iZotope RX, Tower, Beyond Compare, Postbox, VLC. Also tons of audio VST effects plugins.

When I make native cross-platform desktop apps, I usually lean towards Xojo (aka REALbasic), which also has Linux support. And for my cross-platform Photoshop plug-in effects, the Windows versions are in C / Win32 while the Mac version is a C++/Obj-C framework I made to let me use the same code on both Windows & Mac without changes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com