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Comment by citrin_ru | Hacker News Reader

I haven't touched GUI development for many years but 20 years ago I was able to learn Turbo Vision and create a simple TUI app having very little programming experience. A few years later I was using Java AWT and It didn't took too much time to learn it too. I cannot create a WebApp or even an Electron app of similar GUI complexity without spending much more time.

Native GUI is more cplicated nowadays too, but I don't expect it to change too much - controlling layout using CSS+HTML is harder than in most (if not all) native GUI frameworks.

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Cannot agree more. I have used like 20 Native UI Toolkits ( MFC,WxWidgets,QT, WinForms, WPF, VCL, Android, Jetpack, SwiftUi, GTK, and the list goes on ) i have even written one myself ( for in game uis )

I still cannot comprehed how we ended up with the shitshow that is CSS/HTML. Even Javascript nowadays is a workable language ( or otherwise typescript ) WebAssembly is great... but the actual UI Layer with the DOM and CSS .... just a nightmare

Every time i have to work on something a bit more complex on the browser, i ponder of writing my own UI Toolkit based on Canvas/WebGL or WebGPU and just draw everything myself

Flutter for Web is doing exactly that. For some webapps, this might be a great way to go.

I am not sure, Flutter is still using DART ? That's a pretty big no go, last time i looked DART was a haphazard clone of Java/C#/Kotlin with no discerning features of any value.... I rememember when it was supposed to be the new Javascript (transpiling and big dreams of landing a native Dart VM in browsers )

For me its a no go to have a language that's bascially a dead end outside of one specific ui framework.. Seems like a solution in search of a problem.

The performance of flutter on the web is unusable, I would be ashamed to ship an app using it.

What other framework doesn't maintain 60 fps in its hello world?!

Flutter works great on mobile and desktop though, I shipped multiple apps using it and currently writing a desktop app.

I don’t have the patience or interest in messing with GUI frameworks anymore.

Any desktop app I make that needs a GUI gets written in Java. Swing is antiquated but doesn’t change every year like everything else keeps doing. I use an XML UI definition language (Swixml) to make it RAD. With a modern look-and-feel package it looks great, runs fast on modern hardware, works the same on Windows/Mac, is easy to deploy, and most importantly: I know it will work basically forever.

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