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Ask HN: What toolchains are people using for desktop app development in 2025?

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Re: Ask HN: What toolchains are people using for desktop app development in 2025?

#22

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

bsoles wrote: post #3

To my dismay, my company uses JavaScript, HTML, CSS with a custom Chromium-based web browser installed on your PC. The performance is shit: GUI performance that should take milliseconds takes seconds to render with constant pinging of corporate servers and user activity logging. Development mostly done in IntelliJ or VS Code.

At that point, what's the point in maintaining your own browser fork instead of just telling users to point their own (Blink, even) browser at localhost?

Re: Ask HN: What toolchains are people using for desktop app development in 2025?

#23

Post by lyu07282 »

mg wrote: post #8

Now that Chromium supports the File System Access API on desktop and mobile, I am building every software I need as HTML+JS+CSS. Before that, handling files in the browser was cumbersome. You had to offer download and upload links for users to manage files. And handling whole directories was impossible. But now web apps are like native software tools that you can use to edit and manage files on the file system. And t…

+1 Another bonus is that it's properly sandboxed, you only give access to the files/directories and other resources it needs.

Re: Ask HN: What toolchains are people using for desktop app development in 2025?

#24

Post by tra3 »

gwbennett wrote: post #16

For both iOS and Android app: - Xcode - SwiftUI - Supabase - Claude CLI - Skip.tools (converts SwiftUI to native Katlin code) Been developing mobile apps for over 15 years. This is by far the best stack for developing mobile apps. Speed, total control, native UI's. Love it.

Is there a cross plaform desktop option for that?

Re: Ask HN: What toolchains are people using for desktop app development in 2025?

#26

Post by bsoles »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #22
bsoles wrote: post #3

To my dismay, my company uses JavaScript, HTML, CSS with a custom Chromium-based web browser installed on your PC. The performance is shit: GUI performance that should take milliseconds takes seconds to render with constant pinging of corporate servers and user activity logging. Development mostly done in IntelliJ or VS Code.

At that point, what's the point in maintaining your own browser fork instead of just telling users to point their own (Blink, even) browser at localhost?

Control of the chrome around the browser page I guess.

Re: Ask HN: What toolchains are people using for desktop app development in 2025?

#28

Post by woile »

Slint-ui with rust (they have bindings for cpp, Python and js).

Quite good, I've been building this Pomodoro:

https://github.com/reciperium/temporis/

I've also used nix to build the packages when possible.

One of the things I like about slint is that it has native components. They also have experimental support for Android and iOS.

The language is quite simple as well. Though it could benefit from something like flex

Re: Ask HN: What toolchains are people using for desktop app development in 2025?

#29

Post by x0x0 »

vladdoster wrote: post #14

Flutter is a super compelling framework ( https://flutter.dev/multi-platform/desktop ), but I’d live in fear of it randomly being sent to the Google graveyard.

It had layoffs in 2024. And Google has emitted a bunch of words about their support for Flutter, but hasn't taken the most obvious step towards solidifying support: guarantee a minimal spend level on Flutter dev for a decade, either internally or by donating to an external foundation. eg we will spend $x on Flutter until 2036. :shrug: So they've carefully retained the option to cut support at will. Which is their choice, but I recently wasn't comfortable starting a greenfield project in it for that reason.
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