Seeing Electron as an unpopular choice here for making Desktop applications (size-heavy, and slow), I am interested what all options exist to make cross platform apps.
Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?
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Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?
#2Javafx
Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?
#3Adobe Air?
Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?
#4HTML and JavaScript in the browser can still be done on the desktop. If you are willing to make HTTP requests to localhost then there's a number of possibilities. Golang for example cross compiles easily.
Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?
#5Have you checked out [NW.js](https://nwjs.io/)? I'm not sure if it's better than Electron in terms of executable size and performance, but definitely worth a shot.
Then there's [Kivy](https://kivy.org/#home). Love that.
Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?
#6I would take opinions on here from developers with a big grain of salt. I read people saying things like Spotify and Atom are "unusable" and slow because they're written in JavaScript when they have plenty of happy users.
A few 100MB of RAM or disk space extra is a nonexistent issue as well to typical users. I know some developers get very offended at a program using a bit more RAM or CPU than it should be but developer efficiency is more important most of the time so it's a completely rational trade-off. Some of these apps wouldn't exist at all if everyone insisted on native everywhere.
It's all just my opinion as well, but approaches like Electron are very efficient at creating good cross platform apps. Developing and maintaining several native apps is a huge resource drain when most users aren't going to care.
Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?
#7Lazarus is a cross-platform IDE for native desktop applications on Windows, Mac and Linux. It produces fast, low-memory, single executable files for easy installation and deployment. Your app can use native OS controls - you won't be gluing together different libraries from different languages like you do with some scripting languages (with all the bloated size and performance issues that entails).
Why isn't it more popular? Because it's written in FreePascal: a modern, object-oriented version of Pascal. A lot of readers will stop right here and never this give project another glance, the thought of using Pascal as simply too outdated or embarrassing.
If you do give it a try, you'll discover one of the best and most overlooked options for native desktop app development. Any downsides? A major one in my view: poor and patchy documentation (which will be a barrier and block for many).
Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?
#8JavaFX looks pretty good right now... especially if you use Kotlin and TornadoFX with it.
Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?
#9Obligatory: Qt.
I've been tasked as a Qt dev at my day job for the past ~2.5 years writing cross-platform applications. It works, the documentation is pretty fantastic, and you'll find no shortage of help online to get over the admittedly decent learning curve if this is your first swing at "c++" programming.
Edit: As mentioned below, PyQt is also pretty fantastic. My most recent venture into the PyQt world at work was writing a touchscreen application on a 800x450 touchscreen, and it all "just worked."
Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?
#10As a user, bespoke apps (or frontends, anyway) for each platform are obviously ideal. Failing that, Electron is alright. Qt is pretty awful.
As a dev, Unity is nice, but brutal on batteries for normal apps. I wonder if there's a way to hack it to only run the various loops on event changes and thereby be more efficient...