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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?

#91

Post by nevon »

pull_my_finger wrote: post #41
akkartik wrote: post #18

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.

Last time I wrote any LÖVE games was probably more than 10 years ago, so perhaps this has been lost since then, but from what I recall creating a single executable of your game could be done by just concatenating a zip file of your game to end the of the LÖVE binary.

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

#92

Post by ThinkBeat »

Delphi is the easiest and most integrated way of writing cross platform UIs and it has been for a lot of years. It might not be sexy, but highly productive.

You can download and use a community edition of Delphi for free. The downside is insane licensing costs if you are making commercial software.

I an not sure how far Lazarus has come but I believe it to have the same or similar abilities and if free and libre.

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

#93

Post by rixed »

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've been reading these threads litteraly for decades, hopping that someone would finally bring to light a better deal than Qt.

Will come back next year :-(

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

#94

Post by rramadass »

ranger_danger wrote: post #57
LarMachinarum wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have no issues shipping both FOSS (LGPL) and proprietary solutions using Qt without having to pay any license fee... not sure what issues you're running into.

> using Qt without having to pay any license fee...

Would you mind elaborating which Qt editions, linking etc. you use?

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

#95

Post by rramadass »

hermitcrab wrote: post #50
cryptoalex wrote: post #47

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…

>Delphi was so ahead of its time Borland had an amazing knack of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Turbo C++/Borland C++ (with Object Windows library) was the best C++ IDE on MS-DOS in the early/mid 90's. All their tools were excellent. They were leading the industry in the usage of C++ on PCs and should have built upon that advantage; but then they lost it all to MS Visual C++ (with MFC library) when Windows came along.

It was one of the earliest and best textbook case of management screwing up a technical company.

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

#96

Post by doawoo »

written-beyond wrote: post #88
doawoo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

#97

Post by doawoo »

wiradikusuma wrote: post #85
doawoo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

does it support webview?

Unknown, we don’t use web views at all in our app but I assume it’s possible with some work to get the plugin working

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

#98

Post by [deleted] »

jazzypants wrote: post #77
8organicbits wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]

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

#99

Post by stassats »

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…

> 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.

It was hard to do reasonably with qt4 already. The best solution would be to support the C++ ABI natively, but that's never going to happen.

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

#100

Post by hermitcrab »

rramadass wrote: post #95
hermitcrab wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Delphi was so ahead of its time Borland had an amazing knack of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Turbo C++/Borland C++ (with Object Windows library) was the best C++ IDE on MS-DOS in the early/mid 90's. All their tools were excellent. They were leading the industry in the usage of C++ on PCs and should have built upon that advantage; but then they lost it all to MS Visual C++ (with MFC library) when Windows came along. It was one of the earliest and best textbook case of management screwing up a technical compan…

I went to a talk by MS Visual C++ product manager, years ago. IIRC he said that Borland did all sorts of really difficult stuff to make their C++ compiler better and more standard compliant, whereas MS concentrated on easier and more marketable stuff like wizards.
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