Hacker News Reader

Comment by dgxyz | Hacker News Reader

After bouncing around GUI toolkits (from win32 to SwiftUI) and web for 30 years I have simply run out of fucks. They all suck. Each in their own unique way. Apple aren't worth singling out - they are just their own special isolated variant of it.

View on HN

Tcl/Tk is pretty good in terms of rapid development. Unfortunately it has stagnated quite a lot over the years.

Gtk on the other hand is absolutely terrible and its developers don't help by completely rewriting things every few years and breaking all existing code in the process.

Tcl/Tk was also popular in certain niche products, like in RF test equipment.

It's still quite big in EDA (electronic design software).

But, why? It's been 30 years. You'd think somebody would have figured out how to make a decent GUI toolkit or framework.

We just built layers of shit over the ones we have.

They generally get the design right after some mistakes and are stabilizing it, when the new UI designers take over and want to re-do it from scratch.

Have you tried WinForms? It isn’t the latest hotness so Microsoft has to be dragged kicking and screaming to support it in current VS, but they were forced to do so because corporate developers still have some clout.

I still think that WPF was the peak desktop UI framework. Extremely powerful with lots of small composable primitives, can easily do declarative but drop into more traditional event-driven imperative style where it makes sense.

I live in a bizarro universe where I started my career working on an expansive WPF desktop app on .NET Framework 4.0, and am still working on it now on .NET 10. From my perspective it's been WPF the entire time, and it's been pretty okay.

That's actually pretty close to my own career as well.

Similarly, I've been doing It development for pretty much the entirety of my career. When I see the struggles to make remotely useable apps in other frameworks I'm very happy I chose this path

I recall there used to be a problem if you edited a (win)form in Visual Studio on a computer that didn't have the DPI set to 100% - did they fix that?

The work around was 'simply' to switch to 100% DPI scaling before opening Visual Studio. On my macBook Pro built-in monitor, this was not cool.

AvaloniaUI + MVVM toolkit.

I have no complaints using Qt for cross-platform development, it has been paying my bills for the last 15+ years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com