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Comment by Klathmon | Hacker News Reader

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Klathmon·

Code is a different beast than UI.

Magnitudes easier to shim and support multiple architectures.

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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.

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

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.

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