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With the amount of slow electron apps these days I wish more people would write native programs in Pascal / Delphi. It’s blazingly fast and easy to write (altho

With the amount of slow electron apps these days I wish more people would write native programs in Pascal / Delphi. It’s blazingly fast and easy to write (although the language has a few idioms it takes time to get used to).

tracker1 7y ago
I think that there is room for improvement... Flutter is something very interesting, though yet another language (Dart). React Native is also interesting, but actually creating for cross-platform has some niggles. I would think a nice cross-platform UI toolkit for Rust, once async/await drop could be huge. WebAssembly + Canvas|WebGL|SVG as a generic runtime base could go a long way to also bridging a gap. In the end, it really just depends. Right now electron is the closest we've had to a cross-platform application base with a UI that is easily styled and a single codebase for write once, run anywhere that we've had. Most of the cross-platform UI tooling that's come before has kind of sucked. Even getting build pipelines for multiple platforms (even just Linux, Windows and Mac) has been pretty painful. Electron bridges a lot of gaps at the expense of a more bloated baseline. I think things will get interesting and we'll see some new/old paradigms show up.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  I rather use JavaFX or Qt for that. If it can be done just with HTML 5, CSS, JavaScript, then its place is the browser.
vram22 7y ago
Same wish here. I think more people would use Pascal - in its modern incarnations like Delphi (despite the cost, for some who can afford it) and FreePascal (which is free as in beer as well as speech) - if they knew more about it and did not have misconceptions about it, some of which might stem from (wrongly) thinking of those incarnations as being as limited as early versions of standard Pascal (which was probably meant as a teaching language). They are not as limited, they are a lot more, a hell of a lot more.

tracker1 7y ago

I think that there is room for improvement... Flutter is something very interesting, though yet another language (Dart). React Native is also interesting, but actually creating for cross-platform has some niggles. I would think a nice cross-platform UI toolkit for Rust, once async/await drop could be huge. WebAssembly + Canvas|WebGL|SVG as a generic runtime base could go a long way to also bridging a gap. In the end, it really just depends. Right now electron is the closest we've had to a cross-platform application base with a UI that is easily styled and a single codebase for write once, run anywhere that we've had. Most of the cross-platform UI tooling that's come before has kind of sucked. Even getting build pipelines for multiple platforms (even just Linux, Windows and Mac) has been pretty painful. Electron bridges a lot of gaps at the expense of a more bloated baseline. I think things will get interesting and we'll see some new/old paradigms show up.

pjmlp 7y ago
I rather use JavaFX or Qt for that. If it can be done just with HTML 5, CSS, JavaScript, then its place is the browser.

vram22 7y ago

Same wish here. I think more people would use Pascal - in its modern incarnations like Delphi (despite the cost, for some who can afford it) and FreePascal (which is free as in beer as well as speech) - if they knew more about it and did not have misconceptions about it, some of which might stem from (wrongly) thinking of those incarnations as being as limited as early versions of standard Pascal (which was probably meant as a teaching language). They are not as limited, they are a lot more, a hell of a lot more.