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These kind of announcements from Mozilla have become quite regular, and every time I find myself wanting an Electron- or nwjs-like technology to evaluate the po

These kind of announcements from Mozilla have become quite regular, and every time I find myself wanting an Electron- or nwjs-like technology to evaluate the possibility of shipping a real app with it.

kruhft 11y ago
Is XULrunner still a thing?
- JasonSage 11y ago
  They dropped support for it several years ago, I believe.
robterrell 11y ago
Why would you do that? All of the disadvantages of the web stack in the middle, none of the advantages of a stand-alone app. I guess I mean, if you can code for WebGL in JavaScript you can probably code for GL in C even if you're not yet aware of that fact. And if you're just using Unreal or Unity, they already export "real" apps.
- JasonSage 11y ago
  > I guess I mean, if you can code for WebGL in JavaScript you can probably code for GL in C even if you're not yet aware of that fact You're quite right about that. But then writing the rendering code is not the hard part, is it? I'd actually prefer to build my native app in Rust right now, but there's a few things holding me back. Namely: 1. UI layout and rendering: Currently Rust has no packages (that I'm aware of) delivering a good developer experience for building layouts and interfaces. There's a lot of parts to this besides just the layout calculation—there's font loading and text layout, too. 2. Easy cross-platform support: I don't have access to all the devices I'd like to build my app for. That's a relatively small problem, but also one I don't want to worry about if I don't have to. Not only can you write cross-platform logic and interfaces very easily, but the debugging experience for these is also really, really good. Could I figure out solutions to these problems? Definitely. However, I'd rather spend my time crafting a great user-experience for my game instead of building a layout engine. The JavaScript ecosystem is great currently, and if web performance is "good enough" for my use case, I don't have a very good business reason to pursue a different technology stack.

kruhft 11y ago

Is XULrunner still a thing?

JasonSage 11y ago
They dropped support for it several years ago, I believe.

robterrell 11y ago

Why would you do that? All of the disadvantages of the web stack in the middle, none of the advantages of a stand-alone app. I guess I mean, if you can code for WebGL in JavaScript you can probably code for GL in C even if you're not yet aware of that fact. And if you're just using Unreal or Unity, they already export "real" apps.

JasonSage 11y ago
> I guess I mean, if you can code for WebGL in JavaScript you can probably code for GL in C even if you're not yet aware of that fact You're quite right about that. But then writing the rendering code is not the hard part, is it? I'd actually prefer to build my native app in Rust right now, but there's a few things holding me back. Namely: 1. UI layout and rendering: Currently Rust has no packages (that I'm aware of) delivering a good developer experience for building layouts and interfaces. There's a lot of parts to this besides just the layout calculation—there's font loading and text layout, too. 2. Easy cross-platform support: I don't have access to all the devices I'd like to build my app for. That's a relatively small problem, but also one I don't want to worry about if I don't have to. Not only can you write cross-platform logic and interfaces very easily, but the debugging experience for these is also really, really good. Could I figure out solutions to these problems? Definitely. However, I'd rather spend my time crafting a great user-experience for my game instead of building a layout engine. The JavaScript ecosystem is great currently, and if web performance is "good enough" for my use case, I don't have a very good business reason to pursue a different technology stack.