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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

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pjmlp·

How do you think we used to create portable software across 8 bit and 16 bit platforms?

Most of it actually written in Assembly.

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Code is a different beast than UI.

Magnitudes easier to shim and support multiple architectures.

Still doable when user experience is more valuable then developer convinience.

It is all about design a good application architecture from the get go.

I'd love to be shown an example, because I honestly don't believe it is doable, let alone doable easier than just making several different applications.

Non UI code lives in a static/shared lib that gets called from UI code. The non-UI code shouldn’t be coupled to a UI at all, instead reporting progress/completion via callbacks or other notification mechanisms.

If you must run on every platform for whatever reason, there is Rust, C, C# (Xamarin), etc.

That's a valid architecture, but it's not a cross platform UI library that uses fully native looking UI on every platform which is what I'm skeptical of working.

I don't think that fully native-looking UI is a very important thing. Not all of the software has a fully native UI on my computer, and it doesn't matter at all.

I completely agree, but the conversation above was speaking to native UIs being a benefit, and there being alternatives that allow you to "write once run anywhere" with native UIs (which I disagree that this even exists in any usable form)

I'm late, but I think wxWidgets tried this. It was OK, I wrote some stuff with it, but mainly targeted Linux. There were definitely some differences in widgets between platforms, but it looked pretty good for not much effort.

Transmission comes to mind. It as a gtk, osx and Qt GUI

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