I wonder if Unity (the game engine) actually has a sneaky potential here. It’s cross platform, fast, and maybe just maybe less bloated than carrying around an entire browser like Electron?
Flutter is probably better suited for apps
Windows native app development is a mess
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Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#22I wonder if Unity (the game engine) actually has a sneaky potential here. It’s cross platform, fast, and maybe just maybe less bloated than carrying around an entire browser like Electron?
Speaking from personal experience, Godot has the sneakiest potential. It has all the UI components and flexible layout containers you could ask for, a signaling system that lets you put the methods from less relevant components in the scripts for more relevant ones (making for a more compact project), and you can also manually compile slim template builds for cleaner distribution. There's a future there.
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Winforms? lol at them still bekng the best option. so much wasted effort trying to replace them
Winforms is great until you try to make windows dynamically sized, or deal with DPI nicely. In every other regard it's still fine, and for accessibility actually _better_ than many subsequent frameworks. And produces nice small fast executables.
I assume that if Microsoft hadn't abandoned WinForms for the next thing, it would support dynamic sizing and DPI properly. It's mindboggling how much time and effort they've wasted coming up with new GUI frameworks instead of just improving on what they have.
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#24That is why everyone even Microsoft themselves does Electron. Running with html/css/js has benefits it really is open and free development based on international standards and not locked into any single big tech.
Isn’t Microsoft also using React native for desktop stuff?
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#25I'm an embedded programmer who occassionally needs to write various windows programs to interface with embedded devices (usually via serial port or usb), and I find it a breeze to write native gui programs in pure win32 and c++. Recently had to add a new feature to and old program that was last updated in the XP era and two things to note: 1. The program did not need to be updated to run on Vista, 7, 10 and 11, shit…
The one big challenge I've had with big legacy Win32/C++ codebases is migrating it fully from 32bit to 64bit. Loads of know-how and docs for complex GUI controls and structs are lost to time, or really fragmented. Other than that, yeah it really does all just work once you're past that.
Well it's still a 32 bit program so I guess that helps.
Would probably require some porting to make it 64 bit native, but as long as you use the WPARAM, INT_PTR typed and what not correctly it 'should just work'.
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#26I wonder if Unity (the game engine) actually has a sneaky potential here. It’s cross platform, fast, and maybe just maybe less bloated than carrying around an entire browser like Electron?
Unity has a big runtime that needs to be bundled with it to run
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#27I'm an embedded programmer who occassionally needs to write various windows programs to interface with embedded devices (usually via serial port or usb), and I find it a breeze to write native gui programs in pure win32 and c++. Recently had to add a new feature to and old program that was last updated in the XP era and two things to note: 1. The program did not need to be updated to run on Vista, 7, 10 and 11, shit…
The one big challenge I've had with big legacy Win32/C++ codebases is migrating it fully from 32bit to 64bit. Loads of know-how and docs for complex GUI controls and structs are lost to time, or really fragmented. Other than that, yeah it really does all just work once you're past that.
Doesn't WINE have pretty decent documentation by now from all the reverse engineering?
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#28That is why everyone even Microsoft themselves does Electron. Running with html/css/js has benefits it really is open and free development based on international standards and not locked into any single big tech.
I don't know, I think it's pretty embarrassing that Teams is an electron (or whatever) app. The plot on native has been lost so badly that even the fucking company that makes the OS doesn't want to deal with it.
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#29I wonder if Unity (the game engine) actually has a sneaky potential here. It’s cross platform, fast, and maybe just maybe less bloated than carrying around an entire browser like Electron?
Sure but different target market.
CRUD apps are non-trivial.
If Unity were to ship platform native replacement for WPF equivalent (hell or even winforms) it would become a really enticing app development platform.
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#30I wonder if Unity (the game engine) actually has a sneaky potential here. It’s cross platform, fast, and maybe just maybe less bloated than carrying around an entire browser like Electron?
Not sure about Unity, bot Godot is already used to build tools, like Pixelorama (pixel art graphics editor, a bit akin to Asesprite), RPG In A Box (game engine targeted for RPG games), Bitmapflow (tool to generate in-between animation frames), and probably more I don't know about.
Well, if I remember correctly, the Godot editor is written in Godot.