Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]

> A portable GUI interface is a hard problem, unless you mean "a browser window without an URL bar" and your controls are HTML/CSS components[…]

> […] an abstraction layer on top of several genuinely different systems[…]

> […] wxWidgets is perhaps the closest we can get[…]

For good reasons—because you'll likely exhaust yourself or starve of resources before you finish the project, and because it also doesn't tend to help with the readability of the codebase—it should be ingrained in all programmers to be strongly against "portability" approaches that try to make platform X work like platform Y by providing implementations of Y APIs that work on platform X. (See also yesterday's news by Wasmer about their AI-coded approach[1].) The goal is almost always better achieved by defining, up front, the minimum interface that the program needs to be able to work on the host—which forms the kind of abstraction you're talking about—and then connecting that to the actual host APIs (which usually suck to use, anyway), repeating for each platform. Almost.

Desktop UI toolkit APIs are one exception to this—which is unfortunate, because it's like the one use case where people actually try to do the opposite of the usual impulse, and we're all worse off for it.

The major desktop platforms are so few, and the APIs are so stable and so slow-moving, that it's well past the point where the cross-platform native app solution should have been adopting/implementing the platform Y APIs everywhere, where "platform Y" is Cocoa[2]. Like, at the latest, the Oracle v. Google decision in 2021 should have been the last hurdle. People get weird about this, though, and confuse APIs with implementations, or conflate Cocoa with Objective-C (and/or a mandate to program in Objective-C), or think this amounts to a claim that this means we should all be using GNUStep. It's not. It's not any of things. It's very simple: the window-and-widget APIs across all desktops should be Cocoa-shaped. That's it.

1. https://wasmer.io/posts/edgejs-safe-nodejs-using-wasm-sandbo...>

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30359206>

> cross-platform GUI only looks good on the platform that it was originally designed for

Formulated more rigorously, cross-platform GUIs and outsider, non-Mac-first GUIs ported to Mac OS look (and feel) bad on Mac. The opposite is virtually never true though; there aren't really high standards for beauty or consistency on the other platforms. Windows, for example, in this decade is a mishmash of different toolkits (even from Microsoft). Desktop GNU/Linux people comprise a faction consisting of people that either doesn't care about GUI beauty or have standards that are about on par with Windows folks—and are generally so grateful just have an app that ships* their platform, that they won't reject outright any Mac-first app (and that would be true even if it painted itself as a pixel-for-pixel match of the Mac OS version).

* and runs; I still run into "cross-platform" apps that are Electron builds packaged as AppImages that still terminate at launch, even if you try to run them on something as unremarkable as Ubuntu

HTML/CSS components were not available to Guido in 1988. It was in 1989 that Tim Berners-Lee defined the first version of HTML[0] and CSS was proposed five years later[1]. In 1988 Guido would have known about the Mac (1984) which he cites, and the X Window system, which was 5 years old.[2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#Development

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS#History

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#History

The readers' natural question is 'does this look reasonable on multiple platforms?'. A two-second glance at two or three screenshots goes a long way to answering that.