It’s clearly in demand (if a bit of a niche kind of demand)
https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko as a Qt telegram-like
https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion as a Qt xchat-like
https://github.com/manuroe/messagerie for instance is a SwiftUI client proof-of-concept that should work on macOS as well as iOS
None are as polished as Riot functionalitywise, but we will get there eventually - even more so if people contribute.
That's what I'd like to see.
Fractal is the GTK counterpart https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Fractal
Thunderbird also has a Matrix back-end, though XUL is quite close to electron.
Lots of other clients https://matrix.org/clients/
You can write a pretty and functional Electron app in a weekend.
To implement the same level of functionality and prettiness in a native app toolkit like Qt is at least a month of work.
It's the same story as Python versus C, or C versus Assembly.
When C was introduced, the old-timers had the same complains like we do today: why would you program in such a slow and inefficient language? Real programmers (TM) use Assembly, C is for lazy people who don't want to learn and who don't care about the awful resource wasting. 3 KB for a hello world? That's an absolutely ridiculous level of bloat.
And they have a robust ecosystem
https://hackernoon.com/why-i-prefer-nw-js-over-electron-2018...
You can also do so in Qt and other frameworks.
The fact that you are proficient in web frameworks does not mean other tools are less productive.
In fact, being proficient in modern web dev, including HTML, CSS, JS, TS, React, etc. takes way longer than learning something like Qt. And if you go to easier frameworks like Delphi or VB6, you would be amazed at the productivity speed.
But there are already a ton of web developers who already know those web development technologies, but don't know Qt. So it would be extra effort for them to learn Qt. Much easier to just use React.
The same thing goes for why there so many academics write Java apps for their proof-of-concept research work. That's what they're taught in school and for many that's all they know.
Curiously, Python was able to make huge inroads in to the academic community, but that was largely due to having a killer app (Jupyter notebooks) along with having a bunch of desirable tools for scientific computing, data processing, and visualization. I'm not sure if there's anything as compelling in the Qt ecosystem that would be as attractive to web developers who already know HTML, Javascript, React, etc.
Yes, it’s Windows only, but if you really want tight efficient native apps then you’ll want a custom built app for each platform anyway, with a nice standardized API for them to connect to. So I don’t see the Windows platform lock-in as a downside if the goal is good native performance.
That's really only true for web developers trying to make native apps, and only because they're used to the mess that is web development.
It's a piece of cake to build a small app in Qt with C++, and it's even easier using Python or Common Lisp or one of the other language bindings.
Like everything, it depends on each developer's experience which one is easier for them.
Qt is not native in the way that matters: using platform widgets. In fact, the choice of language really doesn't matter if you're using them right: if you have a platform-to-language bridge and it works, generally the end product is not too bad.
It’s comparatively easy to write complex portable applications with tk (or even just strait win32 and whichever X11 widget toolkit is your favorite.)
You can try all-Swift development with SwiftUI.