41–50 of 136 posts
As someone who loved Turbo Pascal, for the past 3 years I use Lua and LÖVE. https://akkartik.name/freewheeling
Windows Forms are alive and well. Still supported in latest .net versions.
Qt with QML for a somewhat embedded use case. I think it hits a really nice intersection of native speed, GPU acceleration, interfacing with C++, and ease of development. I wouldn't really recommend a career out of it.
Qt used to be what I used as well, but the licensing has become so repulsive for professional use that I now refuse to touch it now (not even for my open source side projects where this wouldn't be an issue). Too bad the hopes from the early Nokia adoption days got smashed by MS mole Elop and the later owners of Qt.
We were robbed of a future with lightweight and responsive native apps. Android pales in comparison.
Outside of work, I'm out in left field using Common Lisp for most of my projects, so I'm not sure how helfpul this is, but...
In the past, I used Qt4 because there was an amazing Common Lisp binding and it worked well on Linux, FreeBSD and OSX. It's increasingly hard to use Qt4 any more, though, and changes in the Qt project made the technique used by the Qt4 bindings impractical for Qt5 or Qt6 - at least that was my understanding when I looked into it.
For newer things I've tried LTK but don't really like the looks of it and I wouldn't say it's "modern". It seems to work across platform well enough, though, and for simple stuff it's okay.
More often than not I'm using a combination of the Slime tools in Emacs in combination with an GLFW/OpenGL window. Often I'll use the inspector to display data and make changes that show up in an OpenGL window, or run some commands in the REPL and pop up an image in an external viewer or load something in a browser. It only works for certain types of applications, and I won't even pretend it's practical for end users, but it works pretty well, and it's flexible as a developer.
I'm curious to see what other people say. It's been a while since I madea full blown GUI application.
Qt with QML for a somewhat embedded use case. I think it hits a really nice intersection of native speed, GPU acceleration, interfacing with C++, and ease of development. I wouldn't really recommend a career out of it.
Qt used to be what I used as well, but the licensing has become so repulsive for professional use that I now refuse to touch it now (not even for my open source side projects where this wouldn't be an issue). Too bad the hopes from the early Nokia adoption days got smashed by MS mole Elop and the later owners of Qt.
As someone who loved Turbo Pascal, for the past 3 years I use Lua and LÖVE. https://akkartik.name/freewheeling
Are you shipping apps bundled with LÖVE or just expecting users to obtain it and drag the files onto it? I know there are some scripts out there to produce stand-alone apps, but I wish it were more straight forward or that there were a 1st party tool that did it.
1. Download LÖVE from its website.
2. Download my app (as Lua source code).
It's not going to lead to Instagram-level downloads, but that's not the aim. My goal is to teach people a little at a time to be thoughtful about whom they trust to run code on their devices. Forcing people to take 2 steps hopefully has 2 benefits:
1. You start from day 1 to take baby steps in being mindful of how software is put together for you to use. It's not just a single hermetically sealed box. This part comes from one supplier, this part from another. Both can be modified, and require different skills to modify.
2. You start from day 1 to take baby steps in thinking about whom to trust. Here there are 2 separate projects that would be very hard to collude together. That limits at least the level of malicious stuff I can do.
Summary: I don't want a bunch of people blindly trusting me. I want a few people choosing mindfully to trust me.
- What programming languages and frameworks are popular for desktop apps? - for me - Blazor Hybrid / MAUI / Avalonia UI / WinForms
- Are there any go-to IDEs, build tools, or libraries that make development easier? - I use MSVS 2022, VSCode for .NET, IntelliJ for $$$ at work. There are of course UI control libraries, I am using MudBlazor for Blazor WASM / Hybrid, other than that I use built-in controls that come with each framework. I try to use as little as possible of 3rd party libraries b/c my apps are security-sensitive.
- Do the above answers change if you care about code performance or efficiency (whatever that means to you)? - in my case no, I am able to find what I need in .NET ecosystem. Modern .NET supports ahead-of-time compilation compiling to native code, and that helps to reduce start-up time which is important for Desktop / CLI. Ironically, for a long running processes, like a web service, the just-in-time compilation sometimes produces code running faster than ahead-of-time compilation, b/c it learns most common execution paths at runtime, and is able to recompile on the fly, optimizing for most frequent execution paths, giving a non-trivial performance boost in some cases
- Is native desktop app development still viable as a career, or are most greenfield projects shifting to web-based alternatives - depends on the app/use case. For my project, desktop is the first class citizen, but I am building E2EE apps, i.e. end-to-end-encryption apps, aka client-side encryption, and native / Desktop / CLI is a better fit for E2EE in most of the cases compared to web apps. For those Web apps that I have it is still E2EE but in the browser (still client side encryption)
Delphi was so ahead of its time (a mandatory remark)... I've used Delphi 1 to 4 then moved on to other things. Using .NET since 1.0 beta, and it still remains my favorite stack. The project I am currently building is a software infra for building E2EE applications, and it requires a little bit of everything - mobile apps for key management, desktop/cli apps/client libraries for actually encrypting data, sometimes a w…
Borland had an amazing knack of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.