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Comment by thristian | Hacker News Reader

As it happens, I'm in the market for a cross-platform, database-driven GUI right now. I'd looked briefly at Lazarus, but the fact it still uses GTK 2 (when GTK 3 has ended development and GTK 4 is available) makes me worry about the longevity of the platform.

That said, my other candidates were learning Tcl to write a Tk app (it's gotta be easier than deploying Python/Tk, right?) or biting the bullet and trying to write a single-page webapp that can talk to a local SQLite database, so maybe GTK 2 isn't the worst thing in the world.

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Qt has support for various SQL database interop in its data models.

https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/examples-sql.html

Did you not consider .NET, or did you rule it out for a specific reason?

maui/xamarin is terrible( MAUI is xamarin renamed).

It can't build a macOS desktop version. This was found out a week ago in a "shipping to production" thus forcing a certain team to say no macOS version until v2.. Which is now flutter 3.x now. Flutter better? nah.. just it has a macOS desktop option now.

Also seems pretty hostile towards KDE's MauiKit from an ethical standpoint, as it is both older and trademarked afaik.

Honestly wasn't thinking of maui...

https://avaloniaui.net/

I used this when I had a mac and it worked well.

I wouldn't touch maui for now.

Avalonia is pretty decent. I tried it a bit but didn't want to use it because I realized I was already dealing with enough .NET and wanted a change.

I've been in a similar situation. I wanted to write a simple app for desktop and mobile, I didn't want to do a webapp. I'm looking into dart/flutter for this.

Would recommend, have been playing with it for the last year or so and generally have nothing but positive things to say about it.

Are there already recommended widgets for desktop? I've read a little and it seems that you have to write your own widgets or use existing ones that don't seem comparable to something like winforms/gtk. Lazarus is attractive because of RAD, but I'm also on the look for an alternative using a more familiar language.

Did you not consider Java, or did you rule it out for a specific reason?

I wrote enough Java and Clojure to realize neither would be lightweight enough.

So Clojure for cross-platform GUI is not good enough?

I don’t think that it is fair to say that. JavaFX is a really great, undervalued framework — and it might be even considered ultra lightweight compared to today’s Electron apps.

So you think it's possible to build good businesss stand-alone cross-platform software with JavaFX?

Yes, the java platform is performant, it has a huge ecosystem for all kinds of libraries, multiple languages and JavaFX itself has many components pre-made - though not nearly as many as web technologies.

A JavaFX app can easily run with 100MB of RAM usage, what is your target where it is not good enough?

When did 100MB for forms-oriented apps become reasonable? Just because today’s hardware allows for it doesn’t mean it makes sense.

Look at it from the other side - it is a base memory required for a hello world app. A very complex app won’t take significantly more memory than that.

No, but I will also have to package and ship the JRE, etc. Been there... I'd rather have a much smaller footprint altogether.

There is not even a JRE for quite some version now. You are supposed to bundle a slimmed down “JRE” which only contains the modules that your program uses.

Take a look at wxWidgets, it uses GTK3 for Linux by default.

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