Hacker News Reader

Comment by divan | Hacker News Reader

It's sad to witness how much suffering developers are ready to endure (and make their users suffer) just not to part ways with HTML/CSS/JS stack. The stack that was never designed properly, let alone for modern UI apps.

Flutter would be much better choice for such a desktop app, for example.

View on HN

On the other hand, they shipped, proved the product, and got their first paying customers with a web stack. And the top HN comment thread is people talking about the downsides of Tauri cross-platform.

It's all trade-offs, unfortunately.

you still can't have multiple windows with flutter, which disqualifies it for building desktop apps.

There is an unfortunate increasing trend to build desktop apps that only live in one window, so it's not really a "disqualification" - perhaps more a "complication".

True. But this is actively being worked on by Canonical: https://ubuntu.com/blog/multiple-window-flutter-desktop

How exactly is it a problem for the typical desktop app?

wxWidgets or QtWidgets if you want a proper desktop GUI app.

Heck, Tcl/Tk could work as well.

that's funny, most of the time I don't even want to USE apps written in those because they're dated and janky as hell, must less write in them

My problem with wxWidgets was I kinda wish its API was more elegant

There were also some subtle issues like the child windows leaking a lot of memory in the GTK implementations when idle (something like spamming gobjects).

I wouldn't touch Qt even with a ten foot pole, too much bloated for me.

How so?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com