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Comment by ForHackernews | Hacker News Reader

I hear this over and over, but what is the alternative cross-platform stack for building rich local GUI apps? Qt?

I’d say Flutter, a GUI framework backed by Google and it’s open source.

I’ve recently ported over a popular project called “llama.cpp” to Dart (language behind Flutter) and I’ve recently made YT video’s showing it running natively on macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, iPadOS and next up is Windows.

The official Ubuntu installer is made with Flutter too nowadays. But to be fair, last time I tried QT was somewhere in 2018, it might be a good option too.

But please don’t make web apps with Flutter. It has determinedly taken the pure-canvas route which makes it very unpleasant to use for a significant fraction of users, and all kinds of things just don’t work the right way and can’t. (I’ve written about the problems here on HN quite a few times, search and you’ll find them.)

For web, Flutter has 2 renderers and offers 3 options:

- html: Uses HTML elements and CSS

- canvaskit: which, as you mentioned, uses canvas to own the full drawing process

- auto: defaults to canvaskit on web but html on mobile.

Source: https://docs.flutter.dev/platform-integration/web/renderers

Curious, I haven’t heard of the HTML renderer. Is it any good?

I don't know what metric to use of "good", but the throwaway app I've used it for worked flawlessly with both, so good enough for me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Is the port open-source? I'd like to try it, if so.

My bad, didn’t notice your comment earlier. Yes it is, here’s the repo: https://github.com/brutalcoding/aub.ai

I see Electron, Tauri/Capacitor and friends as a viable route.

Second choice in terms of DX is Flutter. There's nothing like that out there in terms of DX although there are tons of other issues notably around performance.

Third would be Qt but that's not a viable tool because of licensing.

The first two options have no such licensing issues.

Electron is just webdev but you have to ship a whole freaking browser along with your app. I haven't heard of Tauri/Capacitor, maybe I'll check them out.

Edit: https://github.com/capacitor-community/tauri

" This platform is in alpha, expect broken parts. "

So I guess the answer is still "nothing, really. Maybe Flutter"

Or Delphi.

These days I'd suggest Lazarus. Delphi is pricing itself out of the market.

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