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Comment by langitbiru | Hacker News Reader

I don't know what they use to build Sketch. Probably Cocoa. If they use Electron, Sketch can be used even in Linux. But then you would have some people complain about the performance. You can not make everyone happy! :)

But I think they can have the cake and eat it too if they use Qt. But the price of Qt library is quite steep (USD 5500 per year). I know, I know, you can use it freely if you use dynamic linking. But still....

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They don't use Electron. Their website states that they don't plan to release Windows or Linux versions because of the large amount of native MacOS API's they use making it very time consuming and costly to make a cross-platform version of the app.

I wonder how much apps like Sketch and Pixelmator rely on CoreImage to do the heavy lifting. They all seemed to appear after its introduction.

Sketch is mostly vector-based...

Quartz is mostly vector-based as well... OS X has very good support for vector graphics, it's rendering engine is basically a version of PDF-style rendering (like old NeXT used "display postscript").

I guess there's a market for a windows/linux version of this app then? (tho' maybe not as large, given pro-designer tendencies towards macs)

There's a third-party app for Windows called Lunacy [1] that can read/write Sketch files, so there must be a market large enough to make that worthwhile.

[1] https://icons8.com/lunacy

There is also Figma, which is a direct competitor to sketch that is multiplatform, and they indeed run on electron (and even directly in browser). For me that's a great example of electron app done right, as you won't really notice any performance issues.

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