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Comment by remoroid | Hacker News Reader

Yep, if you can even compare Electron to Qt. Electron is just a buggy ill-conceived hack to wrap a browser with nodejs to make webpages. All it provides is a blank window with no customisation and a huge size and memory overhead.

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I hate the slowness and bloat and entire ideology behind electron, BUT...electron apps do a pretty decent job of feeling native on the platform. Something I've never seen a Qt app do.

Would love a counter-example, if you've got one. I'm on a mac.

It's only a problem on Mac.

Windows native apps all look different anyway and Qt is native on Linux.

I can't think of a Qt app that looked odd on macOS. I've developed quite a few pieces of software in Qt for the mac, and they all perfectly use the OS's styles and colors.

Is any of the software publically available? I will critique it.

I know Viber is written in QT, it does not look native on macOS.

I wouldn't know, dont have a mac. But VLC is my best guess at polished software that should look good on mac. If it doesnt... ;/

I don't think VLC is using Qt!

Yessss it is. The gui is written in Qt c++ and all the processing backend is C.

https://github.com/videolan/vlc/tree/master/modules/gui/qt

Only for nix -- for the Mac, it's using native widgets, if I'm not mistaken:

https://github.com/videolan/vlc/tree/master/modules/gui/maco...

(Which is pretty damning -- they already had a Qt implementation, but would rather do real native!)

Ouch. Mac for Qt is definitely the weakest point. Theres some experimental work being done to allow developers to wrap native Mac controls. http://blog.qt.io/blog/2017/02/06/native-look-feel/

This would help a lot, I think. Still a going concern, or a dormant experiment?

Its targeted for Qt6, which is not coming anytime soon, but it gives me hope that Qt always has smart options to move on.

What Electron applications feel native on any platform? I use Discord and it feels and looks like a web-page, not a Windows application.

interestingly, it looks and feels like an electron web-page. They're all following their own little paradigm now..

I feel like slack is decent. It definitely feels like a webpage, but the embedded UI elements are good -- the text boxes support all the MacOS shortcuts, you can insert special characters using the character viewer, text selection works properly, the menus aren't weird.

I guess maybe I'm just so used to web stuff now that that codes as "native enough" to me?

VSCode, Figma.

I've never heard of Figma, but the reason VSCode is as good as it is now is because it's has had increasing parts of it being re-written in C or C++ along with other extensive performance modifications to the electron runtime by the vscode team.

> the reason VSCode is as good as it is now is because it's has had increasing parts of it being re-written in C or C++

Is that true? I've heard that said before but I've also heard that's not true. I haven't been able to find anything indicating any parts of it are written in C/C++ either. The GitHub repo for VScode doesn't have any C in it; infact it doesn't have much but JS/TS:

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode

I do not know vscode but Atom's C++ parts are in a separate repo https://github.com/atom/superstring

not always true, sometimes they use better data structures

https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2018/03/23/text-buffer-r...

That's a really interesting link; thanks.

I agree. Afaik the core of the editor logic in VsCode is all typescript.

There are some native parts, like obviously electron. And I think the find-in-files function uses ripgrep, which is written in rust. But that's a far stretch from "increasing parts of it being re-written in C or C++".

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