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Comment by KnstrOnline | Hacker News Reader

I really miss an awesome cross-platform GUI. Electron is awesome, but bloated.

Qt with QtQuick is awesome, and not bloated :D (as in, it's good enough to work at very decent framerates on embedded systems)

Here's a simple example: https://github.com/jcelerier/TodoMVC-QML

Notice how the whole thing is a bit less than 150 lines, whereas for instance a Vue.js (the web framework the closest to QML in concept I'd say, though JSX is also not far) implementation is around 200 lines with HTML / CSS / JS (even though they say 120 lines?) : https://fr.vuejs.org/v2/examples/todomvc.html

Qt quick is cool, but I never got it running quite perfectly. The examples struggle with the installed libraries, the android support needs a ton of work to set up, they copy the bad parts of javascript ... I like it, but it really frustrates me. There's also little blog-style content about it, which is by far my favorite way to learn.

Agreed. But Electrcn seems to be the only option these days.

Really? It seems like there are a plethora of options. See an endless list at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12376242

Unless you want to move beyond HTML and JavaScript.

Actually no. Electron is the hipster/trending one. Unfortunately it creates monstrous applications with hundred mb sized binaries and gb memory requirements.

Thanks but no thanks.

On the other hand Delphi and its open source brother Lazarus are creating real (not html ones) native apps with sub mb binaries with minor memory footprints using a great IDE that reminds me of VB6.

This is definitely the way to go for desktop apps!

Electron is chic because it looks nice and it feels nice ...everywhere. Until it does not and then the costs of doing it in smh else are too high

Looks nice: agreed.

Feels nice? Try running an Electron app (for example atom or VS code) on a 4gb ram celeron (like the one I have at my 9-5 work) and I can guarantee that you won't like the feeling :/

A lot of people care about looks and ergonomics before performance. I am not one of them but seriously people like shiny things. Even tech users like good UI before having to use your traditional shitty gui but performant app.

They will start caring eventually. Even ordinary people got turned off of bloated-feeling Java apps on the desktop.

Not this tech user and not tech team either. I value my time and a shiny slow UI and often even a good slow UI does not help me with that. My go to tooling to 'get shit done' with my team looks awful and is extremely condensed (one of the forms is one of our 45 page apps condensed into one page) but it is far faster to work with than anything like the shiny things we ship. Both are fast but the none shiny versions are much faster (in everything) because they use less resources, no images etc, so that saves time too when you are working and quickly need to check some flow. Also on slow computers.

I agree a lot of people care about looks and ergonomics, but none tech people complain about Electron apps: a lot of people know the standard things on Windows and these apps behave and look different. For young people this might not matter, but 40+ none technical friends ask me for help a lot with these none standard things where there is no normal menu or preferences is in a different place etc. I tell them to think of it like a webpage and not a Windows app. But it is a Windows app...

It is probably too late to turn things around, but I hope people keep trying. I will anyway. And these kind of articles (and Rebol) give me some hope.

The sad news is, we're the last 2 people on the planet to know what Delphi was.

three

four

You mean, the last 2 people in this echo chamber (outside of which there are orders of magnitude more people getting software stuff done) - there, fixed that for you.

Electron is pushed by JS devs because now they can target another platform with their toolset. The JS crowd is rather large. Sadly, Electron style apps aren't going to go away any time soon.

I hate electron apps ("Simple and light-weight SQL client" is 200MB [or more, because it filled my drive]), but understand why they are used. Creating a good UI is just so easy for JS devs. There are tons of libraries and the web compatibility is an extremely powerful point. I'm really still looking for a solution that is fairly light weight, ease-of-development focused (-> encouraging good code, many don't seem to be) and supports the web as a target.

Kivy is looking to have good principles, but the standard UI kit is quite awful. Supports popular targets except for the web. Qt quick (controls) enables both a good desktop feel and an aright one on mobile platforms. Doesn't support the web (but PureQML is an effort to port the language).

Haxe looks promising but public adoption, for some reason, seems very slim. Adobe Air and things like that promise similar things, but example apps are complete garbage.

React Native works quite well on mobile. There could probably be a similar effort on the desktop, it's surely possible to do something - but then again I'm not a huge fan of javascript either.

I have started doing projects in a browser myself because it is so easy to get started and share what you made, so I can understand that people would want to just use the work they did and bundle it up for shipping. It just looks like something could be done for Electron to lose some weight, at least. Why does it require a Nodejs environment and a browser for every app? Why not adopt the browser model of feeding apps into one renderer for display? Things like that. Maybe they'll wake up some day.

Agreed re. JavaScript, which is why I use Reason (ReasonML if you want to google it) with React and ReactNative. Ocaml but with a syntax that’s easier for my team to swallow, compiles to JS. The Bucklescript team deserves all the nice things in life for their amazing work!

It's OK if they don't go away. We just end up looking better (and having more fun doing so) in comparison. :^)

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