Mentioning that it’s Mac only, and that it’s not free software, would help keep plenty of people from wasting their time.
I guess this would be possible for the VS Code market if you could get the same features in something like Tauri where you can dramatically improve the performance and binary size. But VS Code just has so many fantastic features and extensions now, and is still improving so much every month that I don't know if this will ever happen, would take an enormous talented team to catch up, and how do you do such a thing competing against a product that's completely free.
I hope SerenityOS takes off. It's looking good so far.
I can tell myself that I run my software on a free OS, but I know full well that much (if not most) of the heavy lifting on Linux was paid for by companies. Even in cases where the company isn't explicitly credited (as has been the case in several companies I've worked for that had people getting paid to contribute to the Linux kernel).
I'm sure I have written more trivial things in the past 5-6 years that has no external dependencies paid for by companies. Of course, if you ignore that the compiler, standard library, most of the toolchain and the IDE I use to write that software is all being developed by companies.
I bet that if you really were to look at what's between the pixels on your screen and the CPU, you'd probably find that most of the software you think of as written by individuals for free, results in code paths that spend a lot of time in code that was developed on some company's dime.
I'm also interested in what you mean by "most corporations take way more than they give back". Do you mean that monetizing free software is taking something away from free software?
As a thought experiment: imagine that no for-profit company were to use open source software at all. Do you see where I'm going? You do understand that there is a symbiotic relationship here, right?
It isn't the kind of place where acting entitled because you didn't get your free lunch makes you look good. I think it would be a bit more dignified to be thankful when something is free (as in beer or otherwise), but respect that some things aren't. For exactly the same reasons most of us are here: to make a living.
That's exactly the kinds of elitist bullshit that stinks up the HN comments so often. You have no information at all on the average income here; nor any idea on who all reads/writes on HN. The major difference with reddit is the entitled attitude, not skills/income/intelligence as so many assume.
HN is a circle jerk.
By labeling people as "elitist" when they point out that this leaves you somewhat wanting in the professional courtesy department you only make my point for me.
Try not to feel so entitled to other people's work.
> But for me, and, clearly, many here, either the Mac-only fact, or the non-free fact, mean that we’re simply not interested, and we’re only informed of these facts after many pages.
I'm really not sure what caused you to 'wax poetic' on the value of good software which I don't think anyone is disputing. But it's totally out of place and honestly quite patronizing.
I would like to say a bit more, but basically anything of value I could add to the discussion would start a flame war, so I'll have to abstain :(
In other words, you're assuming that people don't build for your platform because they're "bad."
Why so cynical?
I can understand disappointment around great apps that don’t ever cross the platform threshold, totally, but I’ve never thought of that as terrible, or that the developers themselves are bad. This attitude of “you don’t like what I like so you’re just wasting my time” is super strange.
That's not the case at all. The problem is that, much like shipping native apps, supporting a second graphics API for Mac/Linux is a pain in the ass, so nobody does it. On MacOS, OpenGL is too slow for most modern titles and Metal is too high-level and doesn't have good language bindings. Same goes for why games run better on Linux than they do on MacOS; translating DirectX to Metal is simply too slow, even for the highest-end GPUs that Apple ships. An M1 Max will struggle to get 1050Ti-tier performance when running games through MoltenVK, and doing the same thing through OpenGL certainly doesn't improve the situation.
For minimal compromise, you'd write it in Rust/C/C++ with a GUI toolkit that leverages the native stylesheet to render everything out. It'll be fast, it will run cross-platform, and it will take forever to build. However, this is the """right""" way to do it, and the one that people will complain least about. There's a number of tools that are distributed this way, but again, it's a pain.
For medium compromise, you'd probably end up with a runtime like Java or dotnet. These runtimes have well-established, long-running GUI projects that seek to tackle this exact issue, and for most people they balance ease of development, speed and "good enough" UI. It's not perfect, but a lot of one-man dev teams will end up choosing this when they want to get on every platform with a native-enough UI.
For maximum compromise, you can ship Electron with JS bindings to a native UI. This sucks. Please don't do this. It's an option though, and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention it. It's barely better than just putting a website in a desktop runtime, and if you aren't careful you can end up making it a whole lot worse.
It's definitely possible to do, though. If you want to charge money for your application, I should hope you're building a minimal-compromise program.
I think it's a good thing that there are people who want to work to satisfy the desires of your niche as well as mine, so we can both be happy and productive.
(But VSCode's search functionality is annoying! Here Zas looks lovely ... But, Mac, so, no)
Shipping native platform binaries is the only reliable way to ship high quality software. Specially in 2022 with all the garbage floating around in virtual machines and "electron" bloatware.
Electron isn't the only game in the house.
I was replying about the "binaries" part. Binaries are always paltform specific.
The "only" part of "platform-only" - I can sympathize with. There are some tools I would like to try but I can't because they are windows only.
That said, it doesn't to me like any of the librarires/tools mentioned are good enough.
Qt is in C++ but from what I've heard its performance is abysmal - at least it's not good enough to justify writing something in Qt instead of html/js/css.
Xamarin I had to use one time and as far as I'm concerned, the DX is bad and the end result is also bad. Again, not good enough to justify using it instead of html/js/css.
Though to be honest it's been more than 5 years since I tried, so things might have changed since then ... but I really doubt it.