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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

This app is a great example of why you should use electron in the eyes of some: this is Mac only. If it were electron it wouldn’t be.

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No, this isn't a reason. They're Mac-only because they used Cocoa, which is exclusive to macOS. If they'd used GTK or Qt they could have shared 90% of their application code between at least the three major desktop operating systems, without using Electron.

You don’t share 90% of code between desktop app and web with GTK or Qt. With electron you can share a large chunk.

Yes, and? "How much code we get to share between platforms" is an extremely poor indicator of quality for any technology. GTK/Qt have the advantage of being very fast, having native look-and-feel, and allowing you to share code between platforms. Electron only has that last one.

If you want to maximize code-sharing, you would use webtech for all platforms, including iOS and Android. Yet most organizations don't, because they know that that gives them a poor experience, and they're willing to expend the effort to do native ports to those platforms.

Alternatively, if I'm not making a web application, I literally don't care about the fact that I could share my desktop code with it, because it doesn't exist.

I’m not really sure what you’re arguing. My point is that those who can’t use your app would appreciate electron, not that electron is the best.

> My point is that those who can’t use your app would appreciate electron

...and my point is that nothing about Electron makes it uniquely able to solve this problem. Someone who can't use my app would also appreciate GTK/Qt if it allowed them to use it.

Some people are also unable to use apps because they use Electron. My computer can't play some video games while I'm in a Discord call because of how many resources it uses, but it's perfectly fine in a Mumble call, because Mumble has a reasonably-performant, non-Electron client.

Again, I never said electron is uniquely able to solve the problem lol.

Idk with Qt you can just build a wasm app nowadays and share 100% code

Example of such app that’s mainstream?

I don't know about wasm, but there's plenty mainstream Qt apps: VLC, TeamViewer, Autodesk Maya, Ableton, Photoshop Elements...

You're talking about 90% of the UI layer. The other 90% is the heart of the application and that can be shared.

Well yes, the ui layer is what’s relevant in a feature pare cross platform app.

Well yes, but GTK and Qt apps feel about as native on macOS as Electron apps do.

(At Remotion) We decided against Qt partially based on my experience working on the Dropbox desktop client—Qt sounds great in principle but in practice we think you're better choosing between native or web tech. I'm less familiar with GTK.

You'd rather miss out on 95% of the desktop market than use Qt?

Qt is a particularly poor experience on macOS. Also the past few years all the new stuff in Qt was QtQuick, which seems basically like JS, and if you're into JS, why not just use Electron?

GTK is a non-starter for something professional, at least if the experiences of the GIMP and Inkscape on macOS are representative. (Also, it's C, which does avoid some ABI problems, but it's hardly suited for an object-oriented environment)

GTK is using GObject to retrofit objects into C and actually maps pretty well to OO languages because of that.

False dichotomy—in our case we’d rather _start_ on macOS and then build other platforms separately… than use Qt.

Yep, if you were making a purchasing decision for your company and you had some users on windows or linux this app is immediately crossed off the list.

And the list of Mac-centric businesses is minuscule.

Cofounder here. Yep, this happens and it sucks. We view it as a hard and temporary tradeoff to be loved by few rather than liked by many.

maybe you consider Apple’s approach with FaceTime: offer app for Apple platforms but allow joining via Web Browser?

Planning to release this next week!

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