There seems a lot of conflation between GUI frameworks and interacting with the OS in this article.
Windows native app development is a mess
131–140 of 481 posts
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#132Earlier 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.
It's been a while since I've touched it, but IIRC they made WinForms play with Hi-DPI nicely.
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#133Because I didnt see it already mentioned. Avalonia[1] and Uno[2] for C# are also really great if you want to write windows apps. I wrote some in Avalonia that worked incredible nice on Linux and Windows.
You dont have to use MVVM or AXML for example Uno allows for C# Markup[3] to be used instead or MVUX instead of MVVM.
I personally hate MVVM and AXML but you are not forced to use them.
For Avalonia I dabbled in creating my own replacement[4] for MVVM and AXML using Flecs.Net.
In Avalonia I created a tray icon for the trash bin. So I can see how big it is and clear/open it with a small menu[5].
Both Avalonia and Uno should at least be looked at when judging which framework to use. They are both quite mature and have many great controls and features built in.
[1] https://avaloniaui.net/ [2] https://platform.uno/ [3] https://platform.uno/docs/articles/external/uno.extensions/d... [4] https://github.com/AyanamiKaine/Ayanami-sTower/blob/main/Ava... [5] https://github.com/AyanamiKaine/Ayanami-sTower/blob/main/App...
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
When Microsoft themselves use electron to develop apps what expectations can we have on other devs?
To do better? It's demonstrably possible. And further, why does what some portion of Microsoft, a huge, multi-headed beast, does qualify as the bar for what is reasonable for users to expect?
A question - Which portion of Microsoft, the multi-headed beast develops pure-native apps now ? Even the Windows 11 Settings app is Javascript.
The multi-headed beast has been assimilated by web-tech. They can't code GUI C++ no more - except their compiler/graphics team. And even the latter are dying.
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#135> And from what I can tell, neither are most developers. The Hacker News commentariat loves to bemoan the death of native apps. But given what a mess the Windows app platform is, I’ll pick the web stack any day, with Electron or Tauri to bridge down to the relevant Win32 APIs for OS integration. Well yes as a user I prefer native apps for their performance. It's clearly a mess to develop native apps as the article sh…
Speaking about Electron, for my own little tools I have been using TypeScript+Bun with Electrobun. https://github.com/blackboardsh/electrobun
This is neat! I clicked through about 10 app examples on that page and none of them had a screenshot of the app!
It's a grave sin to have an app repo without a screenshot in the main README.md.
Note: Yes, I know that electrobun itself has videos on the README.md
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#136I write .NET Framework 4.8 apps. And I will until .NET has an actual support lifetime. 4.8 will still be supported and receiving security updates in ten years, .NET 10 will be gone in 2. Hobby projects should not be built on a platform that is constantly changing underneath.
My company is moving our main LOB app to .NET 10 in the near future. It's taken a while but has gotten to the point where .NET 10 has pretty much caught up to .NET Framework for feature support, and our take is that the cross-platform support, performance gains and newer C# versions are worth more than the stability of .NET Framework.
And the gap's going to keep growing - doing the upgrade now means future upgrades can be more frequent and incremental, rather than trying to move 4.8 to .NET 20 in a decade.
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#137> 9 MiB
I'm glad people still care about stuff like this. It drives me insane that the simplest form-based software that I build and compile ends up being 50-100 MiB; several times video games from the 80s that I grew up with that did much more complex work, graphically and computationally, on a tenth of the space.
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#138> But, in 2026, writing a greenfield application in a memory-unsafe language like C++ is a crime.
I disagree, the GUI layer is far from behind a safety critical component, and C++ is a battle-tested choice for everything from GUI, videos games, to industrial applications. If C++ is safe enough to control airplanes and nuclear reactors when used well, it is certainly safe enough for something as trivial a GUI.
The article also fails to mention frameworks like Qt, arguably the best way to write GUI apps in 2026. Qt is native (C++), has built-in memory safety features (but no GC), and is cross-platform.
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#139> But, in 2026, writing a greenfield application in a memory-unsafe language like C++ is a crime. I disagree, the GUI layer is far from behind a safety critical component, and C++ is a battle-tested choice for everything from GUI, videos games, to industrial applications. If C++ is safe enough to control airplanes and nuclear reactors when used well, it is certainly safe enough for something as trivial a GUI. The art…
...but it is comfortable and actually a PITA compared to any managed execution environment :-)
Sure, embedded systems are a different anmial...
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#140> But, in 2026, writing a greenfield application in a memory-unsafe language like C++ is a crime. I disagree, the GUI layer is far from behind a safety critical component, and C++ is a battle-tested choice for everything from GUI, videos games, to industrial applications. If C++ is safe enough to control airplanes and nuclear reactors when used well, it is certainly safe enough for something as trivial a GUI. The art…
Yet we cannot consider Qt to be native app development since every app requires the Qt runtime. Native means system libraries only.