This thread shows for itself the state of desktop app dev in 2025 :) The question was about "toolchains". For me, the word "toolchain" in the context of programming means compiler and linker stuff for some programming language(s) (e.g. LLVM toolchain, or MSVC++), not e.g. Chromium/HTML5 web environment, C#/Java managed languages, Flutter/Electron bloats, or Qt all-batteries-included library etc.
Ask HN: What toolchains are people using for desktop app development in 2025?
111–120 of 136 posts
Re: Ask HN: What toolchains are people using for desktop app development in 2025?
#112I'm retired now so I don't care what the market thinks. For applications I expect to be run locally by myself and/or a few other geeks, I use good old Tcl/Tk. For things where I'm aiming for a wider distribution I use plain html & javascript (no frameworks).
Re: Ask HN: What toolchains are people using for desktop app development in 2025?
#113Electron. I think the hate is undeserved (at this point, they've come along way) and there are plenty of billion dollar companies running Electron apps.
Re: Ask HN: What toolchains are people using for desktop app development in 2025?
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay so we ended up using that too, it was really well done and documented. But in hindsight I think flutter-pi or the Toyota one might have been a better investment. The lead engineer in Sony behind the elinux project left for Nvidia. The Toyota one uses Wayland, you can't make it directly hook into DRM. So you'd need a minimal compositor to get it running.
Flutter Pi had other issues. It required systemd as a dependency just for the event loop which we ended up having to hack out. The Sony embedded project is still being updated and active. And the code quality is much better
Ooof I had a short chat with a maintainer with one of the competing projects and they really hated on the code quality for the sony embedder.
I just didn't like the lack of control you got with the sony embedder, you couldn't specify which display you wanted to show on when using DRM and it was real pain to get it working.
I didn't know about the systemd dependency, but we actually needed it though even though we used Sony because of our dependency on DBus.
Re: Ask HN: What toolchains are people using for desktop app development in 2025?
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about FireFox, does/will it support file system access? I'm not an expert, just thinking this way and don't like Chromium. The idea is to use light web server in application + browser with JS. This makes it easier and more convenient as it can naturally run remote, on microprocessor. Also LLMs are good at generating such UIs.
This is how I develop all the software that I don't work on professionally. I have a variety of small web servers with various capabilities that I use. The latest is Copy Party, which I learned about from HN a couple of weeks ago. My apps are then single files that know how to write modified copies of themselves back to the server. The server is dumb, it doesn't really know that it's anything other than just a file u…
Copyparty[0] is amazing. I've noticed copyparty+webdav is a lot faster for browsing my NAS than smb or nfs from macOS.
I've been meaning to build a gallery application (or simple web page) that can browse pictures from a copyparty instance and sort/organise them with an UI fit for my purpose.
Any pointers how I could make one that self-saves to copyparty?
Re: Ask HN: What toolchains are people using for desktop app development in 2025?
#116As someone who loved Turbo Pascal, for the past 3 years I use Lua and LÖVE. https://akkartik.name/freewheeling
Does LÖVE have support for widgets/ controls (such as labels, text boxes, combo boxes, etc.) for building GUI desktop apps, or is it only for 2D graphics? I could not make that out, on a quick look just now at the homepage and the various modules listed there.
Re: Ask HN: What toolchains are people using for desktop app development in 2025?
#117As someone who loved Turbo Pascal, for the past 3 years I use Lua and LÖVE. https://akkartik.name/freewheeling
Does LÖVE have support for widgets/ controls (such as labels, text boxes, combo boxes, etc.) for building GUI desktop apps, or is it only for 2D graphics? I could not make that out, on a quick look just now at the homepage and the various modules listed there.
There's a GUI library: https://github.com/flamendless/Slab
In general, if you use a minority platform you have to assume it has a tiny minority testing it and so budget for there to be more bugs and so on. LÖVE itself is rock solid, but programs built on it may not be. So I try to minimize the number of layers of libraries I add atop it. So far that has meant I found it easier to just draw my own UI in all my programs.[1] I've only played with Slab a little bit myself.
If you use Slab, please do report bugs. I've done that in the past when I've used it. That's what it takes to make a minority platform more stable.
[1] Drawing all my own UI also keeps my download sizes small. For example, https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel is 400KB. If you take out 4 fonts and the extensive online help, the code itself is only 100KB. By comparison, Slab seems to be almost 1MB of code. But that's just me. I care a lot about being easy to download on slow internet connections, and less code seems more hackable. But I give up some creature comforts, and reasonable people will disagree with me about the value of a UI library.
Re: Ask HN: What toolchains are people using for desktop app development in 2025?
#118Electron gets a lot of hate, but the web is the future and either a PWA or electron app are the easiest cross-platform way to deliver "installable" software.
Re: Ask HN: What toolchains are people using for desktop app development in 2025?
#119- Some mentions of Lazarus and FreePascal (so basically a cross-platform open source Delphi equivalent). And I'd agree with them. - For C# I like AOT assemblies using Uno or Avalonia. - For Go I like TCell (which does cross-platform console mode text GUIs [with cursor positioning, colours, mouse, etc]). - If you're doing vibe coding I find it tends to work best with Electron. - The big omission here is anything Pytho…
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Re: Ask HN: What toolchains are people using for desktop app development in 2025?
#120- Some mentions of Lazarus and FreePascal (so basically a cross-platform open source Delphi equivalent). And I'd agree with them. - For C# I like AOT assemblies using Uno or Avalonia. - For Go I like TCell (which does cross-platform console mode text GUIs [with cursor positioning, colours, mouse, etc]). - If you're doing vibe coding I find it tends to work best with Electron. - The big omission here is anything Pytho…
>The big omission here is anything Python
wxPython and PyQt are some options. PySide too. There are some other less-known ones too. I've not tried Kivy. There is also tkinter which comes built-in with Python.
IIRC, the Dropbox GUI client app was done with wxPython on both Linux and Windows.