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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?

#71

Post by written-beyond »

doawoo wrote: post #51
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.

We shipped a project at work with Flutter recently, specifically using it on embedded Linux, basically a touch screen smart apartment tablet/thermostat combo. Internally the “UI” team is tiny (basically me, a UI/Designer and one or two other part time engineers) and the productivity is astounding tbh

Which embedder did you guys end up using, Toyota or flutter-elinux

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

#73

Post by rpdillon »

Mars008 wrote: post #54
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…

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 upload. I then use SyncThing to replicate that folder structure across all my devices so I have offline access by default.

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

#74

Post by burkesquires »

I have used Xojo before and it is great. It is REALbasic rebranded and has been around for three decades. I used it years ago to write a LIMS interface (pre-Web 2.0). You can download the IDE and use it for free for Linux and Raspberry Pi projects. https://xojo.com

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

#75

Post by MarkSweep »

jlarocco wrote: post #44

At work we use C#, .Net, and WPF. I've only used it at this company, and I can't say for sure if my dislikes are with WPF, or how our codebase is using it. Overall it's not terrible, except for being proprietary and Windows only. 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…

There are defiantly better and worse ways to use WPF. Personally I dislike it when data binding is done in XAML, because there is no compile time error if you rename a property on the C# side.

When I wrote a WPF app at my last job, I write a micro MVVM framework. Basically just an implement ion of INotifyPropertyChanged on the model side and some extension methods to bind the properties to UI elements. It was as strongly typed as possible in WPF.

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

#77

Post by jazzypants »

8organicbits wrote: post #63
Mars008 wrote: post #54

Earlier 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.

https://caniuse.com/native-filesystem-api Looks like Firefox does not support it currently.

It's even worse than that. If you click on the resources section, you can see that Mozilla considers the proposal harmful[1]. They say there's a subset of features that they may consider. Safari seems to be in the same boat, but I can't find an official standards position.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/154

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

#78

Post by pastorhudson »

foresto wrote: post #62

Topping my list of GUI toolkit requirements are cross-platform and native look & feel. As far as I know, Qt still beats everything else in these areas on the desktop. It's mostly excellent. However, I find The Qt Group's commercial licensing (and their tactics as reported by various people on HN) a little scary. If I were to go commercial, I think I would stick with LGPL Qt and link dynamically or give customers my o…

I’m hopeful that toga will be good for python dev cross platform including iOS and android. I haven’t tried it yet though. https://beeware.org/project/toga/

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

#79

Post by debrisapron »

AaronAPU wrote: post #11

I’m using JUCE C++ which is very popular for audio software. But it can be used for more general purpose applications. The latest version has some kind of HTML based UI system but I’ve not migrated yet.

I’m using this too. You get all the JUCE stuff with a web frontend, and it uses the system web view so no huge Chromium binary. The downside is there’s no OS bindings out of the box, you have to provide everything via your native bridge.

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

#80

Post by doawoo »

written-beyond wrote: post #71
doawoo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We shipped a project at work with Flutter recently, specifically using it on embedded Linux, basically a touch screen smart apartment tablet/thermostat combo. Internally the “UI” team is tiny (basically me, a UI/Designer and one or two other part time engineers) and the productivity is astounding tbh

Which embedder did you guys end up using, Toyota or flutter-elinux

flutter-elinux -- By the Sony guys yea? We use that one!
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