Unfortunately OS/WM/DE makers didn't provide a common API, so now web browsers are the "Lowest Common Denominator" for cross-platform apps.
I have to say I feel a bit old hearing developers say "well why didn't the OS developers provide common APIs for creating applications?" which in my mind, is asking why Toyota Corollas and Ford F-150's don't use the same engine. The answer being they were two entire universes, and still are to a great degree.
That being said, while it is desirable to have standard API endpoints that are accessible, and while standards in general are a Good Thing(tm) to have, it does get a bit tiresome to hear different companies like Spotify[1], especially of that scale, bemoaning that they simply "must" use frameworks like Electron to build their applications because developing for individual platforms is just too expensive. If you want your application available on multiple platforms, and you want it to be a good experience to use, then you should be developing bespoke applications for them. That's just... logic, to me.
Yeah, it's more work. But to take a crap ton of web-content, shove it in a .app file and distribute that is massively wasteful, lazy, and results in what that kind of effort typically nets: bad experiences.
For example: I absolutely LOVE the Atom editor. It's a fantastic tool to use. That said I've had to give it up because it was simply killing my Mac's performance, a brand new, 2019, 15" Macbook Pro would sit there spinning it's fans up whenever it was on the screen, for a text editor. A feature rich text editor to be sure, but this thing can play 4K movies without even running the fans. A text editor should not strain it. I can't help but feel Electron is playing a role here.
[1]: I have no idea if Spotify uses Electron. I just know they've complained about this before.
Yeah, they're now a weaker (browser) engine bolted on with adapters to the gui engine. Everyone gets to go through the js bottleneck.
This is a bug, not a feature.
Qt's "dialect" is just C++ - the signals:, slots:, emit etc... things are just plain preprocessor macros which resolve to nothing (https://code.qt.io/cgit/qt/qtbase.git/tree/src/corelib/kerne...). If your editor does not support resolving empty macros it does not support C++ at all anyways.
That's what you get with Qt absent the moc (meta object compiler).
Moreover, there is still a host of reasons why Qt is a painful developer experience (even though it is probably the best cross platform native option). For example, even if you solve the editor problem, you can't reliably use C++ templates, and Qt has its own strings, lists, hashmaps, concurrency mechanisms, memory model, etc. And even if it were just C++, C++ itself is a pretty poor experience compared to other languages on the market these days.
So Qt might be the best thing on the market today, but it's not hard to imagine much better alternatives. For example, browser support for native system things that would render electron obsolete (especially as WASM matures) or perhaps Flutter as its desktop story matures. Or maybe even a mature intermediate GUI toolkit in a modern language.
but which semantic differences are you talking about ? It is plain C++. Function calls are function calls, the only difference being that some are auto-generated and some are your own code.
what do you mean ? signals and slots are just plain functions, there is no magic to understand ; the only thing that QtCreator does is to display a different icon in the autocompletion toolbox.
Do you have an example of an IDE that is not able to autocomplete a signal ? VS is able to, vscode is able to, Xcode is able to, code::blocks is able to, hell even notepad++ in all its "non-intelligence" manages to.
> Anyway, I encourage you to not get too hung up on this particular issue with Qt and consequently miss the broader point.
I am saying that this point does not make sense - else every library which has some concept not perfectly transmitted by raw C++ code (for instance : a library function whose correct execution / lack of UB depends on the programmer calling another function before that) would be problematic.
> I am saying that this point does not make sense - else every library which has some concept not perfectly transmitted by raw C++ code (for instance : a library function whose correct execution / lack of UB depends on the programmer calling another function before that) would be problematic.
My point does make sense, you're just missing it.
First of all, my point is that Qt is a poor developer experience--that its interface is bastardized is merely evidence. Further, even if it were not bastardized, it would still be awful because it's C++ (insane build tooling, no package management, poor error messaging, no memory safety, enormous feature matrix, etc etc etc; all of this has been covered elsewhere ad nauseum, no need to repeat those arguments here). There's a long tail of additional issues with Qt that contribute to its unpleasantness, but there's no point in diving into them here.
Secondly, your stateful library functions example doesn't fit my criticism because stateful functions are part of the C++ language spec while signals and slots are not.
If that was the case, gcc and clang would not be able to build Qt files. Yet the following compiles without issues :
echo "#include <QObject>\nstruct foo : QObject { signals: void bar(); public slots: void blah() { } };" | g++ -std=c++11 -fPIC -I /usr/include/qt/QtCore -c -x c++ -
hell, you can even generate the signals code without moc if you are ok with more macros (https://github.com/woboq/verdigris)
[1]: https://github.com/status-im/react-native-desktop [2]: https://github.com/kusti8/proton-native