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Java and Python have a few. I still don't get how electron got so popular. It's always been pretty straightforward to ship an app with a self-contained Java runtime, much the same as electron ships with v8. Java GUIs have always been worse than c++ ones, but still.. much better than electron I'd say

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And now try to get either to work mobile, or in a browser, or at least try to share frontend code between them. That's where electron shines, and all the "classic" frameworks really don't. QtQuick and JavaFX kiiiind of work for at least some platforms, but it's fairly rough all considered, even compared to the inelegant brute force solution of electron.

I'd put my money on the competing "electron, but smarter" solutions that keep bubbling up, rather than any language-centric framework.

I wish that CodenameOne could have been the norm instead of Electron. Unfortunatrly, its desktop port never matched its mobile one in terms of functionality (still uses JavaFX for web views). I still prefer it over Electron where web views are not required i.e. nowhere

I hate that we are completely enamored with browsers. Desktop apps and browser webapps are different platforms, with different methodologies and motifs.

I hate hate hate it when a desktop app looks and acts like a web app.

pySide6 has been a dream for me, it 'just works' and QT is quite robust.

I am currently fucking with Java via GraalVM, and packaging my app for distribution has been absolute hell:

jlink throws errors.

jpackage somehow gets stuck in an infinite loop that generates a directory tree of seemingly infinite depth (so deep that even Explorer can't delete it)

GraalVM native-image can't complete and throws all sorts of weird error messages

Trying to modularize the app has been hell too, it seems like every one of your dependencies needs to be modularized as well?

And like all I am using is Swing, FlatLaf, and MigLayout :(

How the hell are people getting apps running in a standalone environment?

I really like Java the language, but getting a desktop app running on it in 2023 is a nightmare.

I don't know anything about the QT on python as a runtime. Is it supposed to be just as fast since it's bindings to C++, or is it noticeably slower?

I haven't done anything terribly performance-sensitive with it, but what I have written has performed extremely well. My app starts up to its main window instantly (which SHOULD be table stakes...)

> I really like Java the language, but getting a desktop app running on it in 2023 is a nightmare.

This is honestly because you are taking the hard path and trying to do AOT compilation. Just use Swing with HotSpot. Native Image isn't meant for GUI applications and Swing internally uses a TON of reflection.

Using jlink and jpackage with HotSpot has been trivial in my experience.

I'll look into that, thanks

Also check out Hydraulic if you need more than just packaging, it includes things like autoupdate and custom launchers: https://conveyor.hydraulic.dev/12.0/configs/jvm/#overview

Try https://conveyor.hydraulic.dev/, we replace or drive the whole deployment stack and have plenty of JVM using customers. It's a lot easier, try it out and see if it works for you. I should say though, that the support for native image is experimental.

When I am ready to mark the github repo as public I was going to consider Conveyor, as paying money for it is a no-go right now (unemployed and broke rn)

Not sure if it suits your use case, but the best I have experienced is jDeploy

Interesting... I like how it piggybacks off npm

>jpackage somehow gets stuck in an infinite loop that generates a directory tree of seemingly infinite depth (so deep that even Explorer can't delete it)

This happens when your jar is in the same folder as the working directory: https://stackoverflow.com/a/64743880

>I really like Java the language, but getting a desktop app running on it in 2023 is a nightmare.

I think it's very easy. Do you use a build tool?

I am using Maven

Getting the jar file is easy. But its deploying it that has been difficult

I think you had a massive number of exclusively JS developers out there who couldn't build a UI outside of a website but wanted to. Then Electron came along and gave them that power. That's how it got so popular, imo.

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