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Two things: 1.) I've written only a little bit using GTK, starting over this past month, and it has been very pleasant. The real issue I have is not knowing wh

Two things: 1.) I've written only a little bit using GTK, starting over this past month, and it has been very pleasant. The real issue I have is not knowing what documentation to use, or being a bit confused by the tooling. The existing open source projects using GTK I've been poking at over the last month written using JavaScript, Python, or C are all pretty (relatively) easy to grok and start working on. I'll definitely be back for more... FWIW- I do tend to learn by reading code; so for me, jumping into something totally foreign or unknown is pretty normal. 2.) I'd highly recommend trying Flutter+Dart for cross platform desktop applications. I've been writing my first, for about a month now, on Linux, and it has been fucking great mostly because it works. It uses Skia under the hood so rendering is fast and applications aren't totally bloated. I can speak nothing to building Flutter projects for the mobile or web variants but it seems neat in theory. I'd definitely prefer to not write Dart, but I also accepted long ago, when you want to write GUI you pretty much have to learn a new language. It's close enough to JavaScript and/or Java learning it is pretty much just figuring out "WTF? Is X called?" It's also a lot nicer, IMHO, than things like Electron because there's an actually useful SDK [1]. Electron, like the web, will require to you DIY a lot of really boring shit like wiring up list views to only use/reuse the displayed elements. Flutter, like most desktop GUI SDKs, brings a useful set of widgets to the table you can easily customize. [1] No hate on Electron here; there's zero fault to be had for the web SDKs lacking useful APIs for making web apps... but that's a wholly different conversation I'd rather not have right meow.

heavyset_go 6y ago
> I'd definitely prefer to not write Dart, but I also accepted long ago, when you want to write GUI you pretty much have to learn a new language. It's close enough to JavaScript and/or Java learning it is pretty much just figuring out "WTF? Is X called?" Are you using another language for your app, or is your entire stack in Dart and not just the UI?
- rubyn00bie 6y ago
  Oh; it's all client-only (GUI) right now. So I've only been using Dart in this app (stack), if I need to add server components (which eventually I likely will) I'll write those in Elixir and/or Rust (i.e. languages I already know). Nothing against the idea of server-side Dart, I just don't see a reason to bother with it. I've never really been sold on the idea of using the "same language" for both frontend and backend. I (try to) prefer the right tool for the job; which for my requirements, this time, is mostly how I ended up with Dart and Flutter... and I've been pleasantly surprised. It is the first cross-platform desktop language & sdk pairing I've used that I, personally, don't totally hate. Every other time, I've just said "fuck this" and gone and implemented it whatever the native SDKs were.
ladyanita22 6y ago
What do you dislike about Dart? I happen to like it a lot.
- rubyn00bie 6y ago
  Oh, I don't mean I hate Dart by any means, I've just written UIs in a lot of languages at this point and would rather use something I'm more familiar with... The one very minor annoyance I've had with Dart that immediately pops to mind, and I think is going to be fixed soon (according to the github issue), is typedefs only working for functions. I personally think it makes things a lot more verbose and unnecessarily difficult to read at times ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I certainly like it well enough to continue to learn and use both it and Flutter :)
  - ladyanita22 6y ago
    Something that does bother me is the concept of Isolates vs actual multithreading. It makes me wonder if the message-passing system may have performance concerns.

heavyset_go 6y ago

> I'd definitely prefer to not write Dart, but I also accepted long ago, when you want to write GUI you pretty much have to learn a new language. It's close enough to JavaScript and/or Java learning it is pretty much just figuring out "WTF? Is X called?" Are you using another language for your app, or is your entire stack in Dart and not just the UI?

rubyn00bie 6y ago
Oh; it's all client-only (GUI) right now. So I've only been using Dart in this app (stack), if I need to add server components (which eventually I likely will) I'll write those in Elixir and/or Rust (i.e. languages I already know). Nothing against the idea of server-side Dart, I just don't see a reason to bother with it. I've never really been sold on the idea of using the "same language" for both frontend and backend. I (try to) prefer the right tool for the job; which for my requirements, this time, is mostly how I ended up with Dart and Flutter... and I've been pleasantly surprised. It is the first cross-platform desktop language & sdk pairing I've used that I, personally, don't totally hate. Every other time, I've just said "fuck this" and gone and implemented it whatever the native SDKs were.

ladyanita22 6y ago

What do you dislike about Dart? I happen to like it a lot.

rubyn00bie 6y ago
Oh, I don't mean I hate Dart by any means, I've just written UIs in a lot of languages at this point and would rather use something I'm more familiar with... The one very minor annoyance I've had with Dart that immediately pops to mind, and I think is going to be fixed soon (according to the github issue), is typedefs only working for functions. I personally think it makes things a lot more verbose and unnecessarily difficult to read at times ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I certainly like it well enough to continue to learn and use both it and Flutter :)
- ladyanita22 6y ago
  Something that does bother me is the concept of Isolates vs actual multithreading. It makes me wonder if the message-passing system may have performance concerns.