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Comment by unnouinceput | Hacker News Reader

Awesome. Now show me an Antivirus that will have Firewall / Live scanning / Live protection that is made using HTML and JS. Or you make one using HTML and JS.

I hate Java. I really do. But when it comes to absolute same experience on cross-platform is the only programming language so far. None else is in the same league as Java. A distant second would be Free Pascal/Lazarus but their richness of libraries is like 10% of Java's. And please do not come with Xamarin, that monstrosity must be killed.

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I kinda like Xamarin and use it mainly to create internal business apps for multiple platforms. I also write a lot of native code for iOS and Android and feel comfortable writing Objective-C, Swift, Java and C#.

In case of Android-only I would actually rather use C# and Xamarin than Java.

Why do you feel Xamarin is a monstrosity that must be killed?

Because is MFC, another monstrosity that thank God it died, under a different hat. Microsoft are just re-polishing their old way, nothing remotely innovative there.

> I hate Java. I really do. But when it comes to absolute same experience on cross-platform is the only programming language so far.

The problem is that if we're talking about UIs, then Java is only cross-platform for the platforms you care about.

From a UI perspective, JRandom app using Swing won't work as expected on an Android phone. That's not "absolute same experience on cross-platform". That's instead a portability problem that you must solve explicitly by adapting your codebase to support two different UI frameworks or planning ahead for every possible porting target.

If Java was the end all be all, people wouldn't keep trying to create cross-platform UI frameworks. The truth is Java never lived up to it's hype, Flash ate its lunch when it came to browser-launched applications, and given Oracle's licensing and policies towards Java, no IP is truly safe that is built-upon its technology. If your app got popular enough, a greedy Oracle will come after you, i.e. Android.

I don't think you can make an antivirus, firewall or similar with an UI framework anyway so you will have to go native regardless. Just stick to a native UI framework of your choice.

You're missing my point. You can have both full cross-platform AND native with Free Pascal/Lazarus. And making an AV is within its reach, technologically speaking.

Sciter is commonly used for anti-virus programs (600 million PCs....)

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/c-smile/open-source-sci... (check the logos)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23167751

That's the UI, not the engine itself. My point is to actually make the engine, i.e access files/network packets. I wanna see HTML/JS doing that.

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