Comment by jochung | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jochung | Hacker News Reader

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If you want to make Electron obsolete, make a cross platform UI toolkit that mixes UI and document-style content as good as HTML/CSS does.

End user expectations are for complex layouts, flexible typography, rich media embedding, animated interactions, and so on. I've yet to see a QT app come close to what e.g. Slack has managed to shoehorn in.

It'd be great if we could get desktop level robustness out of it too, instead of being limited to scrolling three or four screens up before it has to start paging out content.

Web UI is bad in many ways, but many desktop adherents seem willfully oblivious about why there is such a desire for this. The only native OS that has evolved to compete is MacOS, with its multi touch driven interactions genuinely making most web stuff feel like the janky lowest common denominator that it is.

What you want is all available in Qt via QtQuick, where you can use QML to define you interface declaratively (in a better way than html+css) and JS for logic with the option of dropping down to C++ or another language with bindings.

If you think that, you don't understand the nature of what is being done with HTML nowadays. It's not about declarative markup, it's about efficient updating of a UI whose shape is completely decoupled from the shape of the state it is representing.

I'm a professional web developer, I'd like to think I know what I'm doing. And I believe you contradicted yourself, leveraging a Virtual DOM to update the DOM (which has an imperative API) from the changes that exist in two sets of data —both products of (an ideally) pure transformation from high-level data— is very much declarative programming.

Meanwhile QML provides you with the same kind of programming paradigm except that you do not have a DOM, you have the QtQuick Scene Graph which calculates how to render your new state in the most efficient way; and, worth mentioning, in a much more efficient way than a standard browser stack would be able to under regular circumstances.

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