We need a better alternative to Web(& Electron) apps

medium.com

6 points·me551ah··4 comments

Blame desktop OS vendors for insisting on parallel universes instead of getting together and coming up with a standard API. We have standard APIs for everything but UIs it seems.

Even huge companies find it prohibitive to develop an app two or three times. For smaller companies and indie vendors its unthinkable.

The same is also true for mobile platforms, but we have pretty good cross platform frameworks for them. Flutter, Xamarin and React Native all have experimental support for Desktop operating systems and as they mature I expect more apps to be built for Desktop with them.

The only problem is that since they can't run inside of the browser, they'd need to be installed before they can be run. While this might turn out to be a better alternative to Electron, it really can't beat the convenience of an URL.

Nor can it beat the resource efficiency and unified platform look and feel that would be offered if platforms supported some kind of common GUI API...

Honestly I'm not a fan of any of the things you mentioned because they're so fat. They insist on making you build the UI within this humungous runtime that also usually forces you to use specific languages and tooling. These also (with the partial exception of React Native) do all their own rendering, so the user's machine now had to run a million parallel rendering engines.

GUI programming in 2020 is a fucking disaster.

I recently discovered the Rust webview crate (library/framework). It makes use of libwebkit to render HTML strings and you can get your Rust app notified of clicks (or events in general?) in the DOM. This might be a cool idea for cross plattform GUI on desktop development, which follows some standard of HTML and CSS and probably JS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com