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No, this isn't a reason. They're Mac-only because they used Cocoa, which is exclusive to macOS. If they'd used GTK or Qt they could have shared 90% of their app
by throw10920 5y ago
No, this isn't a reason. They're Mac-only because they used Cocoa, which is exclusive to macOS. If they'd used GTK or Qt they could have shared 90% of their application code between at least the three major desktop operating systems, without using Electron.
- endisneigh 5y agoYou don’t share 90% of code between desktop app and web with GTK or Qt. With electron you can share a large chunk.
- throw10920 5y agoYes, and? "How much code we get to share between platforms" is an extremely poor indicator of quality for any technology. GTK/Qt have the advantage of being very fast, having native look-and-feel, and allowing you to share code between platforms. Electron only has that last one. If you want to maximize code-sharing, you would use webtech for all platforms, including iOS and Android. Yet most organizations don't, because they know that that gives them a poor experience, and they're willing to expend the effort to do native ports to those platforms. Alternatively, if I'm not making a web application, I literally don't care about the fact that I could share my desktop code with it, because it doesn't exist.
- endisneigh 5y agoI’m not really sure what you’re arguing. My point is that those who can’t use your app would appreciate electron, not that electron is the best.
- throw10920 5y ago> My point is that those who can’t use your app would appreciate electron ...and my point is that nothing about Electron makes it uniquely able to solve this problem. Someone who can't use my app would also appreciate GTK/Qt if it allowed them to use it. Some people are also unable to use apps because they use Electron. My computer can't play some video games while I'm in a Discord call because of how many resources it uses, but it's perfectly fine in a Mumble call, because Mumble has a reasonably-performant, non-Electron client.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- endisneigh 5y agoAgain, I never said electron is uniquely able to solve the problem lol.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jcelerier 5y agoIdk with Qt you can just build a wasm app nowadays and share 100% code
- endisneigh 5y agoExample of such app that’s mainstream?
- malermeister 5y agoI don't know about wasm, but there's plenty mainstream Qt apps: VLC, TeamViewer, Autodesk Maya, Ableton, Photoshop Elements...
- criddell 5y agoYou're talking about 90% of the UI layer. The other 90% is the heart of the application and that can be shared.
- endisneigh 5y agoWell yes, the ui layer is what’s relevant in a feature pare cross platform app.
- Gaelan 5y agoWell yes, but GTK and Qt apps feel about as native on macOS as Electron apps do.
- aejae 5y ago(At Remotion) We decided against Qt partially based on my experience working on the Dropbox desktop client—Qt sounds great in principle but in practice we think you're better choosing between native or web tech. I'm less familiar with GTK.
- throw10920 5y agoYou'd rather miss out on 95% of the desktop market than use Qt?
- prewett 5y agoQt is a particularly poor experience on macOS. Also the past few years all the new stuff in Qt was QtQuick, which seems basically like JS, and if you're into JS, why not just use Electron? GTK is a non-starter for something professional, at least if the experiences of the GIMP and Inkscape on macOS are representative. (Also, it's C, which does avoid some ABI problems, but it's hardly suited for an object-oriented environment)
- malermeister 5y agoGTK is using GObject to retrofit objects into C and actually maps pretty well to OO languages because of that.
- aejae 5y agoFalse dichotomy—in our case we’d rather _start_ on macOS and then build other platforms separately… than use Qt.