Comment by gyulai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gyulai | Hacker News Reader

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> Have there been any other signals of waning investment into Windows?

Wasn't there a story some while back about them crawling the web for PWAs and putting them on the Microsoft Store (or is it Windows store?) to make it into less of a ghost town? And if you go to their official website, browsing vaguely in the direction of UI development, you will see them advertising PWAs as first-class citizens of the Windows ecosystem. I also vaguely remember that Windows+Edge offers special APIs to PWAs for things like file system access and so forth that are unparalleled on other platforms.

I take this push for PWAs (combined with their own lack of dogfooding -- Office is not written with Win UI) as them basically throwing in the towel on Windows-native desktop software (outside of games, maybe).

But, to be fair, native desktop development has seen a lack of investment on all desktop platforms. JavaFX is a ghost town too.

All of that could change, depending on what happens next with Chrome, Bing, and Mozilla. -- The future of each of those seems to be hanging in the balance at the moment.

The web could become a mere implementation detail of the Google monopoly, rather than the open thing it is today. Couple that with a government-level push for digital sovereignty in the E.U. and other places (certainly China). Then, maybe, you will see renewed interest in desktop GUI apps.

On a side note: I think it's amazing what has happened in the open-source space with Rust-based UI frameworks (iced, egui, slint) and COSMIC. The future for cross-platform desktop UI development hasn't looked so bright, maybe since the introduction of Java Swing (was that in the early 00s?)

Qt and VCL/FireMonkey are pretty much alive, as 3rd party .NET like Avalonia and Uno.

Apple is also doing just fine.

It is Microsoft that went south, as Satya apparently sees no value on Windows.

Note the drama on XBox, the console not the Microsoft Games Studios brand, as suffering from the same lack of interest from Microsoft's management.

> Qt and VCL/FireMonkey are pretty much alive, as 3rd party .NET like Avalonia and Uno.

Last time I looked into Uno, it seemed to me more like a mobile-first play (similar to Flutter), but maybe I missed something there.

Qt is still joined at the hips with C++, and I'm finding it hard to imagine that the next generation of developers will go in for C++ over alternatives like Rust. There is a QML/JavaScript story. But why, on earth, would you go there, if history hasn't forced your hand, as it did with the Web.

I hear good things about Avalonia, but: Why throw out the baby with the bathwater and build something "open" within a monopolist's walled garden.

> Apple is also doing just fine.

But "lack of investment" is still not entirely improper as a characterization of how they prioritize desktop versus mobile.

> the next generation of developers

are not going to write code.

...the amout of code we've been writing has increased with the progress of technology, just comparing what it was like to write desktop UIs with Delphi in the 90s versus the amount of code it takes for an equivalent app in 2025. Low-code and vibecoded software from the 2020s are going to be the unemployment insurance for all those greybeards who will still know how to code in the 2030s :-)

That’s wishful thinking. Just because things haven’t changed in the past doesn’t mean it won’t change in the future.

I don’t doubt that the amount of code will not reduce, it’ll just be easier and easier to get AI to fix it.

We are still less than two years into widespread use of this technology, and it’s surprising how good it is.

I am a ‘greybeard’ compiler guy and modern LLMs fix compiler bugs better than me, to a large extent. And it keeps slightly getting better every few weeks.

As compiler guy, how do you see direct machine code generation?

I firmly believe having LLMs generate code for current languages is a transition step, just like Assembly devs had to be convinced optimising compilers were generating the same kind of code they would write themselves.

They are not there yet, but the day will come.

Presumably this would need some advancements in formal verification to make sure the results are correct.

But ignoring that for now, LLMs can already do better than modern compilers when it comes to optimizing code.

It has become a neat way of finding opportunities to implement in a compiler.

Give the LLM a compiler generated piece of assembly and it will sometimes spit out a slightly better version. Then you try and figure out if it's possible to implement it in the compiler. This works really well for blind spots in compilers like generating good vectorized code.

LLMs’ design is around novelty and creativity. It was the missing left brain of computation. We should stick to traditional styles of computation for compilation.

Sure, it took only what, 40 years of intensive hardware improvements* for assembly to move to the fringe? And we still reach out to it more often that I would like to because reasons?

Yep, I guess you can train an LLM on a bunch of binaries to get it to mimic a SotA compiler with some accuracy, which may or may not improve over time, but come on. Times where there were free performance increases are gone, and this is not the area where shipping any bullshit real fast will get you any sort of advantage.

* Which are unlikely to happen again in the foreseeable future.

> the next generation of developers will go in for C++ over alternatives like Rust.

The next generation will not choose a language that is even more cumbersome to use and ugly.

> I think it's amazing what has happened in the open-source space with Rust-based UI frameworks (iced, egui, slint) and COSMIC

Do you mean it is amazing how poor is an experience and how many features, widgets and controls they lack when compared with something like FPC/Lazarus and Qt?

Rust is a nice thing, but its UI ecosystem simply cannot even compare.

Qt and Lazarus had much longer time to grow and mature, and Lazarus can also take a number of pages from the Delphi components book.

What's interesting is the speed at which Rust UI toolkits develop and maybe even mature.

Rust is - by design - antithetical to pretty much every idea of rapid application development paradigm Delphi/VCL and to lesser extent Qt adhere to.

It doesn't matter how many of Rust UI toolkits there are. Consider that there are a lot of Rust game engines, and pretty much zero games written in it, because even C++ gives you better trade-offs in that particular space.

IMO it's not ideal for Rust to have only Rust specific toolkits (at least they need to have other language bindings)

I've tried using Qt (non QML, using rust-qt) last week... initially things were looking fine (despite unsafe everywhere)... but I found quickly that I need unsupported things (deriving from C++ classes), and the project isn't really maintained anymore, so I'll need to so some low level work myself if I want to proceed.

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