Ask HN: What is your prefered language for OS independant developement? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is your prefered language for OS independant developement?

12 pointsjoushx8 comments

Which programming language you`re using for portable application with UI and why? Qt, Java, C#/Mono...?

At the moment, my primary language of choice is Groovy. Second to that, Java.

If I'm using anything else, it's probably chosen because it's purpose specific in some way (like using Prolog for logic programming or R for statistics, etc.).

We're not really doing anything that uses a desktop UI interface (ie, it's all web based) but I have some ideas for some things we may do later that we might build on top of SWT (Eclipse).

I've used QT mostly. We use it because all of our code is C++ and so is QT. Also the documentation is among the best I have seen and there are some great books on the topic.

When possible, make it a web app. Otherwise, I'd love to know more about Sublime Text and Light Table approaches, as they work well enough.

OS independent is the web app. I prefer the traditional PHP/MySQL but YMMV.

Then again it depends on what you are developing. PHP is good for what I'm doing but not necessarily for games and such.

If I needed to make something that ran ON the user's hardware Python or C would be my choices.

A slightly hackish proof of concept IDE I built called Turbo Impress is built off the same technologies that Light Table is using.

https://github.com/philipbjorge/Turbo-Impress

Specifically, I use the Node Webkit project which is an app runtime built on top of Chromium and Node.js. A pretty neat way to get effectively free cross-platform support on Windows, OSX, and Linux.

https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit

I'm not sure how Sublime is getting their cross platform support. I've been interested in it for a while though, so I hope someone chimes in.

ASM.js is inherently cross-platform and its performance is becoming quite impressive.

Java

My interest is: * A portable programming framework including UI * The portability includes being portable to Android * Already has a large base of open source code written in it

The framework that satisfied all these conditions was Simple DirectMedia Layer, version 1.2. Cross-platform games and applications which have been in development for over a decade can be ported with incredible ease to Android.

I have a particular focus on Android though, so your needs may be different in other cases.

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