Ask HN: What are my options for building cross-platform desktop apps with V8?

5 points·nicksergeant··4 comments

Is this even possible? Could you use Google's V8 engine to build Win and OSX desktop apps? Could we utilize node.js in this aspect? Are there any libs or frameworks that make this possible?

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QtWebKit: http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/QtWebKit

WebKitGtk: http://live.gnome.org/WebKitGtk

I have no personal experience with either. It would be rather bleeding edge on both ends to use either of these to interface with nodejs for a desktop application. And then once you realize the complexities you might wonder why bother making it a desktop application at all.

do you think there is need for javascript for desktop like javascript wrapper for Qt?

A few years ago I would've said yes. But, thanks to the iPhone and Android, so much new technology has come to web browsers recently that there aren't many reasons to develop native desktops apps anymore.

If you don't need native widgets, one possible angle is to use the v8-gl OpenGL bindings, and an OpenGL widget toolkit. No activity on v8-gl in over a year though, so it may have bit-rotted (I haven't had an occasion to try it): https://github.com/philogb/v8-gl/

SDL bindings for v8 would be another way to get from v8 to a cross-platform graphics environment with a reasonable set of widget libraries, but it doesn't look like there's any available v8-sdl binding.

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