Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

> Pro tip: If you decide to make a native app, don't use Electron. Instead, use the built-in WebBrowser/WKWebView components included in .NET and macOS. Create the UI once using whatever web framework you want, and code the main app logic in C#/Swift. Although the WebBrowser control kind of sucks right now, Microsoft is planning on releasing WebBrowser2 which will use Blink. I think they might also have it where the libraries are shared between all apps using it, to further reduce bloat. The old WebBrowser component can be configured to use the latest Edge rendering though by adding in some registry keys or adding this meta tag: > > >

Great to know, thank you.

How about "being aware of what your abstraction layers cost, and being palpably aware of every needless contortion you create"

know what everything does. call if from up on high? fine, but only if you literally can trace that high level call down to the machine code it emits :D C compiler suites can do that no problem "gcc -S mycode.c"

For an appropriate dose of humility, so that you know that I'm not elevating myself here, but pointing out reality, check out GCC or LLVM source code.

Something like Lua or Berkeley DB can be defined inside your program in a matter of a few hundred lines of included library code, but what does it DO?

Bringing SQL and a database on board is rather odd for a desktop app, wouldn't you say? Configuration should be flat files, ideally, or managed via the apps gui, in which case an embedded database like Berkeley DB is usually more relevant. Your mention of SQL smacks of "all things are nails, always use hammers", to me at least.

Have you worked with the actual computer itself in any capacity? I mean ASM, C, C++, etc, but essentially being aware of what an ABI is, what types actually are (memory shape patterns so we can define physical memory in terms of our data structures) Javascript is not computer programming, but rather programming the browser, or it's disembodied transplanted javascript engine. the animal is completely different from physical memory and actual instructions.

Computers essentially manipulate memory structures. The further away from this you get, the more likely that your abstractions will be leaky, not fit what computers are actually DOING with your data, and this results in beautiful script driving janky machine code.

Seriously, while we all like to pretend that everyone is equally special, let's recall that someone is a VBscript for Word expert, and that this is basically a virtual machine that itself is just defined inside someone elses program. Technological stacks are defined in terms of semi-arbitrary made-up things other people made-up and that you just need to know how to use.

>Modern browsers these days are powerful things... just a curiousity, are there non native browsers?

Sort of. There are browsers written in things like Java (HotJava was an old one that was basically a demo app) and so I guess anything written in a VM-language could technically be considered non-native.

I understand the concept of making a native app to include using the native UI platforms. What you described is hardly more native than electron, which is basically a web app at heart.

Or maybe there needs to be a consensus on terms. Do people consider electron apps to be native? I would put them in some weird middle ground, but definitely closer to web technologies than native development.

>No internet? No web-app.

I've seen lots of tools that spin up a local webserver and then use that to serve the webapp even offline. But then the question becomes is this really a webapp if I have to install a native server?