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Comment by gyulai | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

> 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.

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