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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, my prediction is that native apps will make a comeback when the UI toolkits catch up. Flutter is in this vein. And some of the Rust UI ecosystem looks promising (although very early stage).

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Agreed, I think the web was simply first in being a highly versatile, capable, and relatively cheap to develop with cross platform UI toolkit.

I’m much more optimistic about the future of native apps, the best ideas from the web are already making their way into Rust and the recently announced .NET MAUI, and with WebAssembly I think we’ll start to see native performance on the web instead of the other way around.

> with WebAssembly I think we’ll start to see native performance on the web instead of the other way around.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. WebAssembly doesn't do anything to help the rendering bottleneck. To do that you really have to replace (or innovate in some way) the DOM.

I think the approach many is taking is just put a canvas and draw on top. Internally, you may end up creating another DOM like structure to store all your objects. The worst thing about this approach is that you lose all browser's native support like accessibility. I think Flutter is using a combination of DOM, CSS and canvas.

Sure, but at that point it's not really "web" anymore. You're just writing to a WebGl or WGPU canvas, which you could do just as well from a "native" app.

So we've basically reinvented Java applets - 25 years later.

> And some of the Rust UI ecosystem looks promising (although very early stage).

Can you recommend any projects to check out?

Iced https://github.com/hecrj/iced and Druid https://github.com/linebender/druid

Iced is taking the "get something working now" approach, whereas Druid is taking the longer term "build it right" approach. I wouldn't recommend either of them for serious projects yet though.

I would also recommend Raph Levien's blog https://raphlinus.github.io/.

https://www.areweguiyet.com/

Can they catch up? I feel the reason why web apps took off is because so much money has been spent on the underlying technologies (HTML, CSS, etc.) that makes them extremely powerful.

I’ve used a lot of UI frameworks and getting to do anything complex is always much harder than doing the equivalent in HTML/CSS/etc.

I think so. Web has the advantage of already catering to literally every layout & style use case (grid, multiple columns, floats, inline elements, etc. etc. etc.). But Flutter has the advantage of being designed from scratch so it can avoid all the idiotic mistakes the CSS made (e.g. box-sizing, the insane difficulty of centering things, etc.).

I don't think it will take too long for the niceness of a sane design to outweigh the lack of features.

The only thing I'm not convinced about is that Flutter-web will ever be viable for most web pages (i.e. non-app ones). It kind of works but it's big and slow. Probably eventually people will do a native website, and then use Flutter for mobile and desktop.

Something that one can easily do even with Motif and Windows Forms, just learn the layout APIs to start with.

Check out elm-ui.

https://korban.net/posts/elm/2019-11-17-elm-ui-introduction/

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