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Comment by yes_but_no | Hacker News Reader

At this point its hard to come up with interesting arguments. I don't like electron as much as the next guy, but if you ever tried to develop a desktop app you can easily appreciate Electron for what it is.

Anyway heres some other choices might be viable these days: - Flutter desktop https://flutter.dev/multi-platform/desktop - Jetbrains Compose https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/compose-mpp/

IMO immediate mode guis should be option as well, like imgui, egui. (But afaik you basically throw accessibility out of the window)

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Worth noting that learning Flutter means learning the language Dart, which is good for pretty much exactly one thing: writing flutter apps. If a friend was seeking to achieve proficiency in either frontend web tooling for the purposes of writing an electron app versus learning Dart, I know which _I'd_ recommend to said friend given the long term marketability of each.

for what it's worth I recently tried Flutter out and despite having never used Dart I kind of.. could just write it. It feels like the most unopinionated Algol type language ever and I've you've ever written Java or C# or JS it's very natural to pick up.

It bothered me so little that overall Flutter seemed way simpler to me than the web-tech stack because I had also very little experience with web apps.

I'm mainly a js developer these days, and I'd agree with that. At a language level, sure, Dart is quite easy to pick up. For every language though, I find the much harder part of being proficient is learning the ecosystem/best practices.

> learning Flutter means learning the language Dart

I think any current experienced software developer can easily switch between 3 or 4 popular languages, and pick up Dart quickly too since it's not that different from everything else out there. Dart is not Brainfuck or Lisp.

But would I want to insert Dart among one of those 3-4 languages just to make Flutter apps? I doubt it.

Canonical is using Flutter for many apps in Ubuntu Desktop, including the installer.

[0]https://github.com/orgs/canonical/repositories?q=&type=all&l...

The Lagrange browser for Gemini[0] was built in C with and it's cross-platform thanks to SDL. It's still possible.

[0]https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange

Everyone forgets about accessibility. Sure you can imagine just rendering various widgets to the screen but then coming up with a cross platform accessibility model that works with users’ existing tech is always pushed to the far off future. The amount of work done on platform native ui kits is astounding and web is the only platform I‘be used that can remotely come close.

Even though Compose Desktop is still Alpha, I think you can probably make something viable with it, after having tested it out a while.

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