Electron is much better in my experience than most other cross platform toolkits. It gets better with troubleshooting as you use it more.
I prefer not to think of electron as a toolkit, but as an embedded web browser.
Ask HN: How to build a desktop app in 2022
11–20 of 38 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to build a desktop app in 2022
#12If I was going to try using something new it would be Flutter/Dart.
If I was going to use something (old) that might be Qt, or something that I know from way back straight up Java Swing. For something big a framework like Eclipse RCP. Should be able to use Kotlin for these now at least.
Re: Ask HN: How to build a desktop app in 2022
#13[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How to build a desktop app in 2022
#14The road is filled with dissatisfaction. I love desktop apps and developing at that layer but it’s clear that the segment has stagnated over the years.
QtWidgets - decent experience, lots of functionality out of the box. Rapid iteration is lackluster compared to web dev. Great docs. Less obvious “best practices”. Works well from C++ and Python. Distribution is annoying.
QML - Not much experience, didn’t attract me since less advanced widgets available.
Dear imgui- very fun to program using this lib. Can get decent visuals and functionality. Breath of fresh air to remove a layer of complexity. Start to miss some QoL features (animations, undo/redo, etc.). Low level, no docs (examples + reference docs), hard to style. C++ but has bindings in tons of languages.
WPF - decently powerful. Kind of stagnated and windows only. Can still produce solid UI. C#
Alternatives: Godot, Webview2, GTK, fltk
Re: Ask HN: How to build a desktop app in 2022
#15Lazarus is a cross platform and open source GUI builder based on Free Pascal. If you can handle begin and end instead of { }, you'll get used to it fairly quickly. As a bonus, it does strings that you never have to allocate or deallocate, and can handle a gigabyte of data.
I've run Lazarus on a Raspberry Pi Zero W (the old one), Linux, and Windows.
Re: Ask HN: How to build a desktop app in 2022
#16Electron is much better in my experience than most other cross platform toolkits. It gets better with troubleshooting as you use it more.
Is there any Electron usecase that Tauri isn't better suited for?
Re: Ask HN: How to build a desktop app in 2022
#17If you want to keep with the browser based rendering, I've used this for a couple side / internal projects: https://github.com/webview/webview
Works quite well for normal things, but 3d webgl stuff can go a bit haywire.
Re: Ask HN: How to build a desktop app in 2022
#18C++ and Qt; all in one : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)
Re: Ask HN: How to build a desktop app in 2022
#19Electron is much better in my experience than most other cross platform toolkits. It gets better with troubleshooting as you use it more.
Is there any Electron usecase that Tauri isn't better suited for?
A big problem with Tauri is that it doesn't use the same browser everywhere. You should maintain support different browsers, with different version on different platform. With Electron it's a just fixed version of Chrome.
Re: Ask HN: How to build a desktop app in 2022
#20Lazarus is a cross platform and open source GUI builder based on Free Pascal. If you can handle begin and end instead of { }, you'll get used to it fairly quickly. As a bonus, it does strings that you never have to allocate or deallocate, and can handle a gigabyte of data. I've run Lazarus on a Raspberry Pi Zero W (the old one), Linux, and Windows.
As much as I like Lazarus, I wouldn't recommend it for complex data visualizations by someone skilled in web tech.