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Comment by keskadale | Hacker News Reader

Question: Why do we need Electron alternatives? Why do we need to develop applications that need a bundled browser to run? Why can't we just use GTK/Qt?

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Have you tried developing relatively complex UI with QT? You need to hire a team of engineers and spend man-years of effort to build custom UX that in the web / Electron can be replicated with an npm install fancy-library.

Yes, I hate Electron, but the alternative is not QT; it's something like Sciter.JS with real Web API compatibility (or perhaps a stripped down WebKit2 which is much less resource-heavy).

I am convinced that the sort of Web API compatibility so many people demand is only a few native libraries away. I would like to start experimenting in this area but I can only get rust-sciter DLLs working with "vanilla" Sciter and not Sciter.js, and I don't want to use other languages.

I worked in a job where people developed very similar Qt and Electron apps, in both cases it was a one person effort and the development took about the same time.

Would you be able to mention these apps? I would like to take a look.

Not really, they were apps made for museum exhibitions, not apps that you can download

There is a lot of effort currently being put into creating web applications. It would be nice if we could use the fruits of that labor on desktop and mobile applications.

That's how I understand it, anyway.

It would also be nice if people understood and really appreciated the trade-offs of doing so – i.e. hogging resources, killing batteries, potentially wrecking the end users' experience and ability to multitask efficiently, etc.

The two main reasons I’ve always heard against QT in particular are

1. Non C++ devs don’t want to write C++/participate in the C++ ecosystem at all. While there are plenty of QT binding libraries for other languages, they seem to be of varying and unpredictable quality.

2. QT has potentially difficult licensing: https://www.qt.io/licensing/

Disclaimer: I’ve never used QT.

Their licensing is written horribly, to just FUD companies into buying their commercial license.

However, the library components offered under LGPL3 are all you need to ship a perfectly good desktop app. The GPL3 licensed stuff listed in the comparison chart on the page you linked are typically the utility applications like Qt Designer which you won't need to ship with your application anyway.

It's unfortunate how the company backing Qt is going about this. But it's a great framework overall.

(At my last firm, we shipped several apps via Qt and it's always been a joy to use.)

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