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Comment by wazanator | Hacker News Reader

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wazanator·

If all you are wanting to do is make desktop gui stuff for your family C# + Winforms is super easy to pick up.

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Assuming the GP has equally zero knowledge of both, it would be better to start with WPF.

Or perhaps skip it altogether.

Most of my “family” apps is just quick hacks in JavaScript. Simple to throw together, runs on everything with a browser, like the tv, and is easily published on anything serving static files, like github pages.

Edit: For some more hobby like projects C# works out quite nicely though. I’d say it’s probably easier to stick with the beaten path here if not seeing a particular advantage from a functional language. I hear F# is quite nice as far as a functional languages go though.

I've been wanting for a while a lightweight Electron alternative that doesn't use web views, just native APIs, and uses Lua instead. So it would be an .exe file that looks for a main.lua somewhere, and runs it, giving access to modules that wrap the Win32 API in high-level functionality. Then you could run a command that combines the .exe and the main.lua into a new .exe file that you can distribute. It would be super lightweight and wouldn't even need a compiler to be installed to be able to make tiny lightweight apps.

The nerd in me just saw a great application of a futamura projection. ;)

So something like LÖVE2D with wrapped Win32 APIs? That would be super cool, I wonder if anyone has done something like that.

I know there are Win32 Lua APIs. Maybe this is a 10 line windows app that just loads those in a host that loads main.lua?

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