Is it really so hard to write a native GUI for three OSes if you must?
Makes we wonder if Electron apps really have to suck up that much memory. Could the framework be tuned to use less?
Yes, they all have complex widgets like grids and stuff. Grids being layout managers, not widgets.
On the web I have a lot of choice, also in .NET. Not so much in qt or wxwidgets. I have seen some very nice Java desktop apps recently so maybe that's a good choice now despite a not so good reputation.
It's super cheap when you have to get something done quickly. The functionality you get is insane.
I have looked around for qt but there wasn't much. And what I found didn't look very good.
Yes. What makes you think otherwise?
Building a simple UI for multiple platforms may be somewhat more time consuming than a single cross-platform Electron implementation. This will scale with the complexity of the UI.
This particular application has about the simplest UI imaginable. Consume some keystrokes, render some rows of text. Implementing this is any native UI platform will not be hard - but it will reduce the memory footprint, rendering time, and application bundle size.
Native UI frameworks are actually really good at rendering simple applications on their platforms. There’s usually plenty of documentation and good development tools. Building an application using one of them is definitely different from web tech - but I don’t think it qualifies as hard. And I reckon it would be useful for more of us to experience as many different platforms as possible - it’s a great way to learn!
HTML breaks in ways you won’t predict. Some things you’ll have to hack together so hard you’ll want to take a shower afterward. And it’s only a matter of time untill that piles up enough to justify using native UI from the start.
> And it’s only a matter of time untill that piles up enough to justify using native UI from the start.
That's a little hyperbolic and counter to my experience.
https://github.com/rust-gnome/gtk