> Not really sure why there was so much hate on swing, probably from the people who never used it. No performance issues, looked good enough for users, theme ab

> Not really sure why there was so much hate on swing, probably from the people who never used it. No performance issues, looked good enough for users, theme able. I actually built apps that when compared with other native themed apps would not have been distinguishable from windows native. AWT was slow and ugly but not swing. Let's unpack this... > Not really sure why there was so much hate on swing Swing itself isn't bad (compared to its predecessor in AWT) but Swing is still an abstraction over multiple different and incompatible desktop UI toolkits - therefore it has to compromise. > probably from the people who never used it Used it as an end-user, or used it as an applications developer, though? The last time I used Swing was around 2010 - and I admit that I haven't stayed on-top of new developments, but I assume that Sun/Oracle switched emphasis away from Swing over to JavaFX (their WPF-compete) and that Swing hasn't changed much (at a fundamental level) much. Please correct me if I'm wrong. > No performance issues Yes-and-no. Things like repainting a busy charting component is fast enough, sure - but one thing about Swing that sticks out like a sore thumb is abysmally slow window repainting when a window is resized - I first noticed this when I was a lame warez kiddie using Limewire almost 20 years ago (wow...): actively resizing the Limewire window would cause the JVM to pause repainting the window and just draw a black background color until a few hundred milliseconds after I finished resizing. I've noticed similar behaviour in other Swing applications. It isn't pretty. Especially on macOS where users expect to be able to smoothly resize application windows. > looked good enough "good enough" is not exactly the best review in the world > themeable Yes, but who honestly goes through the effort to make an entire theme just for their own application? That's only affordable if you're a software giant or a company whose brand identity is heavily based on their software UX (and if that was the case, they wouldn't be using Java for desktop applications). > I actually built apps that when compared with other native themed apps would not have been distinguishable from windows native This may have been true in the final months of Windows 98/Me and Windows 2000, but Swing's inability to correctly reimplement (or even wrap) Windows XP's visual styles (especially the animated controls and when running outside of 96dpi mode) was exactly what gave Swing that uncanny-valley feeling (granted - and hypocritically - Microsoft's own WPF is also guilty of this, which is why I avoided it entirely until recently).