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

I recently came across a comment [0] here that highlighted the challenges of building native desktop apps with LLMs. The commenter pointed out how scarce training resources have become—few blog posts, tutorials, or open-source projects exist compared to web or mobile development. They also noted that while desktop app development was a solid career path in the 90s, it's now seen as a dead end for most, outside of big players like Microsoft or Adobe.

This got me thinking: My own experience with desktop development dates back to the late 90s using Turbo Pascal 6 in Delphi, and I'm out of the loop on modern practices. With the evolving landscape, I'm curious about what tools and workflows developers are actually using today.

Some questions to spark discussion:

- What programming languages and frameworks are popular for desktop apps? - Are there any go-to IDEs, build tools, or libraries that make development easier? - Do the above answers change if you care about code performance or efficiency (whatever that means to you)? - Is native desktop app development still viable as a career, or are most greenfield projects shifting to web-based alternatives?

I'd love to hear from folks with recent experience—success stories, pitfalls, and recommendations would be great. Thanks in advance for sharing!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44841291

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.

I support Java software using a Swing GUI. It's fairly performant, but requires a fair bit of boilerplate for setting up the GUI and can take longer than typical web development.

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.

Within game development it's Dear ImGui. https://github.com/ocornut/imgui

Normally with the Windows DX12 backend, sometimes with the SDL+OpenGL backend if you want cross platform support.

Other frameworks are sort of disappearing. C++ all the way although some use it with C#.