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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

You are incorrect. Toolkits like Qt are exactly what people are talking about when they say "native". How many apps do you think still use X11 graphic primitives? Did you even know they exist? How many programs use native Win32 controls? Not even Microsoft does that anymore.

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> How many apps do you think still use X11 graphic primitives?

Good question. Let's see, what are the GUI programs that I use every day... Emacs, exwm (separate X client so I guess it counts even if elisp), st, chromium, mpv, mupdf, conky. That's 6 out of 7, so I guess the answer is most of them?

(Emacs is built with --without-x-toolkit)

Hmm, I do not consider an Qt app on macOS to be native.

>How many programs use native Win32 controls? Not even Microsoft does that anymore.

So because Microsoft has lowered the bar, now everything can be called "native"? There's a reason many people hate UWP.

Not using native Win32 HWND based controls does not imply UWP. Virtually every program that was made for Windows XP and later does not use native Win32 controls; this includes “outdated” frameworks like WinForms.

X11 and Win32 UI are actually fairly similar in this respect.

Actually the VCL[1], shipped with Delphi, does to a large extent use the native Win32 controls. They've added some quality of life stuff on top of them, but the TEdit component[2] is a wrapper around the Win32 edit control etc.

Delphi is not so popular these days, but there still is a fair share of Delphi programs running.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Component_Library

[2]: http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Seattle/en/Vcl.StdC...

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