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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?

#81

Post by lousken »

irishcoffee wrote: post #9

Obligatory: 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 w…

I've tried Qt creator and during typing it uses ~20% of my CPU, the same visual studio code uses.

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#82

Post by dom0 »

vram22 wrote: post #68
irishcoffee wrote: post #9

Obligatory: 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 w…

One real world success story for Qt: Andy Brice (Oryx Digital, UK) has been developing his successful desktop software product, Perfect Table Plan (a seating planner software for events), in C++ and Qt, and selling it for over 10 years. (His newer product HyperPlan may be done in that stack too.) I've been a reader of his blog from some time: successfulsoftware.net. Many good tech and more biz tips there (for the sof…

> moc

FWIW I never had to delve into understanding what exactly it does apart from "is invoked by build system to generate some code" in the course of many years of working with Qt.

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#83

Post by dom0 »

geokon wrote: post #62
irishcoffee wrote: post #9

Obligatory: 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 w…

I program in C++ professionally and about every 6 months I get the Qt tingle and think "I should really get around to learning Qt". But whenever I start to look into it I start to feel like I'm supposed to learning some custom language and it's not C++ at all - and how am I going to work this into the rest of my workflow I've got a pretty vanilla workflow with CMake, the GNU tools, the STL and emacs/KDevelop/CLI to t…

> And is this all a lot less of a headache than I'm imagining?

It really isn't much of a headache.

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#84

Post by Hydraulix989 »

old-gregg wrote: post #37
seanwilson wrote: post #6

I 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 develo…

Every Electron app I tried halved my battery life. Sure, regular people won't complain about your electron "desktop" app, they'll just complain about crappy batteries of their laptop, or about "my computer getting slow". In fact, every time you hear a non-programmer complain about their computer it's usually not a hardware, but a software like electron that's ruining their experience. OSes have started to add applica…

This is absolutely the case.

I can get literally double the battery life on my Thinkpad if I close Slack, Messenger for Desktop, Atom/VSCode. Chrome uses multiple extra watts of juice in powertop than Firefox, and every Electron.JS application is really just a Chrome instance.

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#85

Post by Hydraulix989 »

pabloski wrote: post #59
nathan_f77 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried switching to Atom a few times, but I couldn't handle the slowness. It's just too laggy. On the other hand, I recently switched to VS Code, and I couldn't be happier. The startup is still a little slower than Sublime, but the editor is blazing fast. I really think this is just a problem with the architecture of Atom. Spotify is also a bit slow and clunky, but it's not too bad. There's no reason why they couldn…

Maybe Microsoft is making heavy usage of Node native modules. I don't know for sure, but I suspect this is the reason why VS Code is much faster than Atom.

As far as resource consumption goes, VS Code is definitely the lesser of two evils.

I can't help but be reminded of the "VS Code uses 13% CPU when idle due to blinking cursor rendering" post that was on HN earlier last week, referring to the following issue:

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/22900

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#86

Post by jonathonf »

nkkollaw wrote: post #78
jonathonf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something a little less hyperbolic might be better, e.g. what specifically is wrong with FreePascal?

The fact that the project is not popular because of the language it's written with..?

Why is FreePascal unpopular (or what makes you say that)?

Is it lack of mindshare, lack of "hotness", some specific deficiency, or... ?

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#88

Post by jonathonf »

9214 wrote: post #20

Red language

Still missing the whole cross-platform GUI thing though.

    $ ./red
    Compiling compression library...
    Compiling Red console...
    --== Red 0.6.2 ==-- 
    Type HELP for starting information. 
    
    >> view [text "Hello World"]
    *** Script Error: view has no value
    *** Where: catch

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#89

Post by candiodari »

nurettin wrote: post #15

We use delphi at work. It is suited to building in-house apps iOS, Android and Windows, as well as web services on Linux.

What version of Delphi are you using ?

Don't you find the lack of 3rd party library support somewhat difficult ?

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#90

Post by vram22 »

dom0 wrote: post #82
vram22 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One real world success story for Qt: Andy Brice (Oryx Digital, UK) has been developing his successful desktop software product, Perfect Table Plan (a seating planner software for events), in C++ and Qt, and selling it for over 10 years. (His newer product HyperPlan may be done in that stack too.) I've been a reader of his blog from some time: successfulsoftware.net. Many good tech and more biz tips there (for the sof…

> moc FWIW I never had to delve into understanding what exactly it does apart from "is invoked by build system to generate some code" in the course of many years of working with Qt.

Good to know, thanks.
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