4 ms·

Ah indeed, I am one of those painful macOS users.. the carelessness with which the mother company changes and/or breaks API's overnight still boggles my mind. I

Ah indeed, I am one of those painful macOS users.. the carelessness with which the mother company changes and/or breaks API's overnight still boggles my mind. It's funny, I have some experience with Swing, from work, and I kind of like it, API-wise, so I toyed with the idea of JNI'ing my way around it... but it seems such a ridiculous thing to do for a super-simple GUI. Plus missing the chance of actually learning a 'native' (native as in code) GUI toolkit. I remember playing with Qt (many) years ago and making a mental note to get back to it but a 2020 revisit turned into an exercise in frustration, couldn't get it to build anything (very likely to blame on my ageing XCode installation rather than the Qt SDK). But as you point out, licensing issues & overall maker's attitude need to be considered too. The imgui's are quite neat. I like the fact that building one of the demo's (with an impressive array of widgets) sort of 'just worked.' That's impressive, these days!

GuB-42 6y ago
> Ah indeed, I am one of those painful macOS users.. the carelessness with which the mother company changes and/or breaks API's overnight still boggles my mind I suppose that's one of the reasons why Electron is so popular these days. If MacOS is constantly changing its APIs, that Microsoft can't seem to decide between classic Win32 and Modern UI, Linux that is split between Qt and GTK, plus all the mess on the mobile side. Because OSes can't provide a consistent API, app ship with their their own OS! (a browser today is essentially an OS on top of an OS).
- BruceEel 6y ago
  > Because OSes can't provide a consistent API, app ship with their their own OS! (a browser today is essentially an OS on top of an OS). This. Even when targeting a single platform the developer may very well choose to use one of these frameworks just to avoid having to deal with the most horrible parts of the platform in question (and GUI's tend to be those parts.)

GuB-42 6y ago

> Ah indeed, I am one of those painful macOS users.. the carelessness with which the mother company changes and/or breaks API's overnight still boggles my mind I suppose that's one of the reasons why Electron is so popular these days. If MacOS is constantly changing its APIs, that Microsoft can't seem to decide between classic Win32 and Modern UI, Linux that is split between Qt and GTK, plus all the mess on the mobile side. Because OSes can't provide a consistent API, app ship with their their own OS! (a browser today is essentially an OS on top of an OS).

BruceEel 6y ago
> Because OSes can't provide a consistent API, app ship with their their own OS! (a browser today is essentially an OS on top of an OS). This. Even when targeting a single platform the developer may very well choose to use one of these frameworks just to avoid having to deal with the most horrible parts of the platform in question (and GUI's tend to be those parts.)