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Comment by diath | Hacker News Reader

Making good GUI software requires a lot of iteration and trial and error before you're satisfied with the UI and UX. With a web-based tech, you make a change, auto reload triggers, you see the change almost instantly, making tweaking very easy. If you're working with a large Qt codebase, every little change to a header file requires a long ass compile times. It's really frustrating when you spend an hour just tweaking a few controls when you know it could have taken 5 minutes. Also, the reactive model as seen in web frameworks like React or Vue is much superior to the typical flow of state management in retained mode GUI applications in desktop frameworks. Until we have a decent solution that solves these problems, people will continue using tech like Electron or OS web views.

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On the other hand, the developer convenience offered by Electron et al. comes by sacrificing runtime efficiency. It's astonishingly wasteful of resources, and that waste gets multiplied by every computer that runs the program, and every time it is run. The long-term costs saved by the developer are thereby amplified and pushed onto the users, in the form of shorter hardware upgrade cycles (and potentially increased electricity usage).

Just as a book will be read many more times than it is written, the burdens associated with a program's architecture will be borne many more times (collectively) by its users than by its developer. This is why I avoid web-based tech when building applications.

Relatedly, I'm glad to see that sustainable computing has begun showing up in global discourse.

It takes half a day to implement proper hot reload in QtQuick, which also has all the reactive features. Even less now that AI can just write it for you, and it’ll be more performant than Vite dev builds.

Coming to desktop app development from the web, I’ve got most of the same conveniences I’m used to like GammaRay as the inspector. The only real difference is I’m willing to wade through cmake and linking errors.

Even QWidgets is still super fast to develop with if you’re using PySide (although hot reload is a bit more difficult to implement and distribution becomes the nightmare).

QML is not native, PySide uses Python. If you pick either of those, you lose native controls and low level language for performance, so again, may as well use web-based tech. Especially that HTML/CSS support significantly more styling/animating options than QML.

Qt Quick components are just C++ classes[1].

[1] https://github.com/qt/qtdeclarative

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