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It's a shame that cross-platform GUI toolkits seem to have fallen out of favour somewhat (as in, native toolkits like Qt or GTK). I wish it were not so. I can s

by danmur 5y ago

It's a shame that cross-platform GUI toolkits seem to have fallen out of favour somewhat (as in, native toolkits like Qt or GTK). I wish it were not so. I can see why the electron route is so tempting, I just really hate them as a user. I wrote a bunch of GTK desktop apps with Python like 15 years ago and they were snappy and you'd never even know it was Python behind it, but I wouldn't do that now. Too hard to distribute, bindings a bit clunky, lots more cross-platform testing, it's hard to look at the relative levels of effort and not take the faster path.

beowulfey 5y ago
I’m not one with much experience, but I rewrote my Qt based code for a small python app into C++ and the results were amazingly better. I would bet GTK might be similar!
api 5y ago
Qt is pretty good, but honestly since React came out I can't code a GUI in any other way. Reactive is the way to do (application) GUIs, period, and anything else feels like clunky bug-prone spaghetti. I put application in parentheses because other paradigms may make sense for high performance rendering pipes like games. Honestly I don't think HTML5/CSS/JS is that bad as a pure presentation layer. It has warts as they all do, but it can be made to look decent and is fairly productive. The bloat is mostly the fault of Electron specifically. Tauri and Sciter are much leaner, in some cases leaner than Qt depending on the app.
jschwartzi 5y ago
A Qt install with all the bells and whistles is about 500 megabytes, so it’s very comparable in size to Electron. Qml is a lot easier to develop in than Node+browser though.
- thereddaikon 5y ago
  Size on disk isn't, or shouldn't be a problem today. In an ecosystem where there are games that take up over 100 gigabytes of storage, few apps should be large enough to make a user double take. CPU and Memory usage on the other hand can be serious concerns and one where Electron apps have a serious problem compared to traditional approaches.

by danmur 5y ago

beowulfey 5y ago

I’m not one with much experience, but I rewrote my Qt based code for a small python app into C++ and the results were amazingly better. I would bet GTK might be similar!

api 5y ago

Qt is pretty good, but honestly since React came out I can't code a GUI in any other way. Reactive is the way to do (application) GUIs, period, and anything else feels like clunky bug-prone spaghetti. I put application in parentheses because other paradigms may make sense for high performance rendering pipes like games. Honestly I don't think HTML5/CSS/JS is that bad as a pure presentation layer. It has warts as they all do, but it can be made to look decent and is fairly productive. The bloat is mostly the fault of Electron specifically. Tauri and Sciter are much leaner, in some cases leaner than Qt depending on the app.

jschwartzi 5y ago

A Qt install with all the bells and whistles is about 500 megabytes, so it’s very comparable in size to Electron. Qml is a lot easier to develop in than Node+browser though.

thereddaikon 5y ago
Size on disk isn't, or shouldn't be a problem today. In an ecosystem where there are games that take up over 100 gigabytes of storage, few apps should be large enough to make a user double take. CPU and Memory usage on the other hand can be serious concerns and one where Electron apps have a serious problem compared to traditional approaches.