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The main thing that Electron does is solve most of the platform abstraction issues. The only contender that comes close to this is Qt. However, if you want to

The main thing that Electron does is solve most of the platform abstraction issues. The only contender that comes close to this is Qt. However, if you want to hire Qt developers, that's a much smaller pool and then you also need to pay Qt license fees for each one. If you want to develop truly native applications, now you need to maintain builds for Windows, Mac OS and perhaps even Linux. You need developers familiar with all of these native frameworks. Optimizing for developers isn't necessarily worse for users, if they can get more done in less time, users benefit. It's just not so obvious. No user will ever complain about a product they aren't using because it won't ship until next year with half the features.

de_watcher 7y ago
You don't need to pay Qt license fees if you don't do secret modifications to the Qt library itself.
- solarkraft 7y ago
  Are you sure you don't need to pay about 5k€/seat/year for commercial development?
  - bdemirkir 7y ago
    You don't need to pay at all. Comparison is here: https://www.qt.io/download https://www.qt.io/download Basically, you need to link dynamically or provide object files. You can't use commercial modules too. But that's only a small portion of Qt anyway.
  - dx87 7y ago
    Yep, paying just gets you extra Qt features and allows you to make the whole application closed source. The community version requires you to keep the Qt portion of the application under the LGPL, but you can still keep the rest of your application closed source and just link agains the Qt code.
- gridlockd 7y ago
  This is not the only issue with LGPL code, but fair enough: commercial development is possible without paying for the license.
lpcvoid 7y ago
There's also Lazarus/Freepascal [1], which has platform support and GUI capabilities for pretty much every CPU/Platform under the sun. [1] https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

de_watcher 7y ago

You don't need to pay Qt license fees if you don't do secret modifications to the Qt library itself.

solarkraft 7y ago
Are you sure you don't need to pay about 5k€/seat/year for commercial development?
- bdemirkir 7y ago
  You don't need to pay at all. Comparison is here: https://www.qt.io/download https://www.qt.io/download Basically, you need to link dynamically or provide object files. You can't use commercial modules too. But that's only a small portion of Qt anyway.
- dx87 7y ago
  Yep, paying just gets you extra Qt features and allows you to make the whole application closed source. The community version requires you to keep the Qt portion of the application under the LGPL, but you can still keep the rest of your application closed source and just link agains the Qt code.
gridlockd 7y ago
This is not the only issue with LGPL code, but fair enough: commercial development is possible without paying for the license.

lpcvoid 7y ago

There's also Lazarus/Freepascal [1], which has platform support and GUI capabilities for pretty much every CPU/Platform under the sun. [1] https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/