> One could imagine a world where strong standards have been established w
And yet this didn't happen and Electron did. The "free market" of FOSS development settled on Electron as the winner for cross-platform development.
And yet this didn't happen and Electron did. The "free market" of FOSS development settled on Electron as the winner for cross-platform development.
Decisions were taken with an eye to balance sheets and P&L reports; Electron remains the cheapest option of them all, because the supply of moderately-skilled HTML/JS labor is naturally larger than for any other language - all thanks to choices the Netscape Corporation made in 1995, when they needed interactivity in their product and they needed it quick.
For instance, if Apple had actually kept pace with OpenGL standards, and had embraced Vulkan, it would have been fairly straightforward to to build a native GUI framework which works across platforms.
Electron won because all the platform owners basically had to embrace the implementation of web standards on their platforms. So they couldn't prevent those tools from being used to deploy local software as well.
There literally are cross-platform native GUI frameworks. Even Electron itself is a third-party implementation of a GUI framework - it doesn’t use the platform’s web tech implementation and bundles its own.
All these little wedges add up.
Imagine a world where everything had to be deployed to the JVM and all progress depended on Sun/Oracle. Or god help us, IE/VBScript.