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Comment by wolvesechoes | Hacker News Reader

"Well, you should compare the JS UI ecosystem to other UI ecosystems like Android and iOS, not ecosystems that run on one machine with no UI."

"People who have never touched any UI tech until HTML/JS have no clue how good they have it"

Tech like:

- Delphi/Free Pascal, where usually code from 20 years ago compiles today with minor adjustments?

- Qt, developed and maintained for over 30 years, currently at 6th major release?

- Win32, and frameworks built on top of it like MFC, WinForms, WPF?

Yeah, we are SO lucky we've got JS ecosystem. It is impossible to think how people lived without it.

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Just to reinforce how stable the desktop environment can be:

- Qt has had a mostly stable interface since Qt 4.0 and that was twenty years ago.

- Win32 has had barely any breaking changes since it was introduced with NT 3.1 in 1993 or so.

Most of the UI/UX churn in that space comes from fashion changes in UI design.

On the other hand, I can write a very complicated graphics-related app in React+tons_of_libs within _days_. It took me months to do that in Win32 API in 2005.

The developer velocity enabled by React is insane.

Yes, saying that calling Win32 APIs is not the most ergonomic approach to writing UIs would be an understatement, but if any software can be called stable, this is it.

I would compare win32 API to vanilla JS. Whatever framework you might want to use on top of win32 is what's comparable to the criticized web tech in the article.

Your win32 app would have been much faster with much less memory hogging though. I would prefer to run that compared to your React app.

The choice really is between React and nothing. React (and Electron) enabled a lot of apps to be written that would not have existed otherwise.

Calling Win32 directly was already old fashion when Windows 95 came out in 1994, let alone 2005 when .NET was four years old.

The only folks already doing Win16 development with pure C code, instead of a C++ framework (OWL, MFC, VCL), VB or Delphi, were stuck in jurassic park.

The only valid reason for raw Win32 applications are games.

I liked it in the Jurrasic park

> Delphi/Free Pascal, where usually code from 20 years ago compiles today with minor adjustments

Not always. I attempted to upgrade some open source 32bit Delphi frontend code to 64bit/ARM, but the specific GUI toolkit was never ported.

It's similar for Java frontends, JavaFX in particular seems to be a moving target.

QT is a bit of an outlier in terms of frontend stability, but at the cost of the UI looking pretty dated.

Qt apps UI can look very good if QML is used with some effort. I wrote about it here: https://rubymamistvalove.com/block-editor

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