Ask HN: What languages / environments to build desktop apps in 2014? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What languages / environments to build desktop apps in 2014?

2 pointsdgellow4 comments

Hi hackers.

I have some ideas of desktop applications I want to work on this year. As I have very little experience with the destkop world I am wondering what are the current ways to develop one. I am mostly a web developer with experiment in backend and frontend, with an affinity for functional programming but I am open to everything.

What technology would you chose to build a desktop app in 2014?

Please, precise the language, framework and targeted platform(s).

(I'm interested in everything, not just multi platform solutions)

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I was in a similar situation, having an idea for a desktop app, and I dove straight into .NET / WPF on Windows.

My reasons were that a) there are great many Windows computers around and people still use them, b) .NET and WPF are mature and documentation is available on MSDN / StackOverflow.

With Windows 8 around, however, I am also looking at WinRT and will most likely dabble in that, too.

And now, what do you think about that choice?

Do you only target windows users?

Are there some drawbacks you can warn me about?

I have done C# development but only on server side.

I would love to be able to support Linux and Mac but am not willing to dig into C++ / Qt or similar alternatives. It's a hobby project, which I should have mentioned previously, not a commercial work.

C# is great and WPF/XAML is OK; I can't really make any profound comments as I've only done web development previously and am not familiar with any other desktop technologies.

With regards to HTML5/Javascript superseding WPF in the future, I am not convinced - Microsoft should shed some light on their plans in the near future (the Build conference is in April I think) so we'll see.

I would chose Java and not C# and not .NET and the main reason is that it is not clear if Microsoft will continue supporting them or switch completely in a javascript/html5 environment. I would also question your willingness to write a desktop application because I get the notion you want to experiment rather than a real reason. In that case you can write your app in a non-web language and interact with it through other means.

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