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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

> makes cross-platform desktop app development achievable

Personal opinion - this has never been not achievable. It just requires making it a priority.

And it's not as if creating and maintaining an Electron app is somehow free. This "not free" aspect is compounded if you care about making it fit in with the rest of the desktop environment. Which, being fair, most developers (PMs, Managers, Execs) don't, even when their customers do.

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You're right that it's possible, and electron development isn't free, but it's significantly easier for a team of two than it is to maintain native Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

One way I think of Electron is that it's fine if it's a primary app I'm using, but when it's a side thing that I have to leave open (Spotify, Slack), it can annoying. I agree that I'd rather native apps for better performance and resource usage, but I understand the developer's plight.

There's no developer's plight for Spotify and Slack. They both have tens of millions of clients running. They can afford to make something better and if they had any respect for their users or the planet, they would.

I think one of the biggest problems with modern app development (web and desktop) is how much developers assume that their app is your primary app (and thus can hog resources/screen space/etc). The only apps that can ever reasonably make that assumptions imo are ones with real-time interaction, e.g. games. Anything else can and will be a side app in some scenarios.

You omitted half of that quote. OP is talking about small companies and indie developers.

There was a great cross-platform environment called Visix Galaxy in the 1990's. You could compile your C++ source into native apps that ran on Windows NT as well as Solaris and HP-UX. It had a fantastic GUI builder which is similar to what is available today.

It's possibly still around: http://www.ambiencia.com/overviewgalaxytd.php . Expensive as fuck, though; if I understood the pricing page correctly, it's $1.5K for a single-developer no-support license of the cheapest version. (Dunno what the differences between versions are.)

Free Pascal / Lazarus is a FOSS cross-platform language and GUI IDE. I'd recommend trying that in stead.

Found via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19754073 -- Thanks, @DonHopkins!

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