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Hours instead of weeks? What makes you assume that? An experienced web developer can iterate pretty damn fast. I can understand the appeal and advantages of us

Hours instead of weeks? What makes you assume that? An experienced web developer can iterate pretty damn fast. I can understand the appeal and advantages of using native GUI tech. Really. But there is a reason people use stuff like Electron/Tauri/Wails. Web tech has seen so much investment, and as a result, you now basically have a app platform that runs anyhwere, offers a huge ecosystem and a great developer experience. Which I never found to be matched in any other GUI toolkit. If there was a GUI toolkit that offered me all of this without requiring the bloat of a browser, then I would switch in an instant. It's just not there.

bitL 4y ago
I was specifically mentioning building UI, i.e. the process of creating a set of screens with events to carry out the required functionality, which was what Delphi shined in. Web tech is about building distributed apps, so while you might repackage them as desktop ones using Electron, it's a massive overkill for 99.9% use cases and thoroughly suboptimal. Yet there aren't any GUI builders worth anything after 20 years of web tech and using libraries like React just increases cognitive load instead of reducing it by being unnecessarily verbose for little benefit.
- graboid 4y ago
  If I build a desktop app using one of the above-mentioned technologies, there is almost nothing "distributed" about it. HTML, CSS, Javascript. Which is where 99% of my UI building happens. The only thing "distributed" what comes to my mind and what I think you mean is what would be an API call in the browser, to fetch some data that the frontend needs. The equivalent in Electron/Tauri/etc. is usually some bridging API that you can call instead. I never missed any GUI builder. Browser dev tools are phenomenal IMO, you can drag&drop elements across your layout, change any part of your styles and instantly see the effects, measure rendering performance, memory consumption, debug your Javascript or simulate different screen sizes. About React, nobody forces you to use it. There is a myriad of frontend frameworks, at all levels of complexity. If you feel your app is so simple that you don't need any framework, you can do without. Frameworks (and again, there is a huge world outside React!) came up because they make managing state in complex UIs easier.
  - bitL 4y ago
    In Electron apps you still have the boundary between frontend and backend, that means it's in its core a distributed app. If you don't like GUI builder, that's a fair opinion, but I do and don't want to waste my time on textual descriptions of what is essentially visual, and don't want a Figma subscription to get some half-baked version of that either. Avoiding React equals to avoiding 95% frontend/fullstack jobs these days so it's only theoretical.

bitL 4y ago

I was specifically mentioning building UI, i.e. the process of creating a set of screens with events to carry out the required functionality, which was what Delphi shined in. Web tech is about building distributed apps, so while you might repackage them as desktop ones using Electron, it's a massive overkill for 99.9% use cases and thoroughly suboptimal. Yet there aren't any GUI builders worth anything after 20 years of web tech and using libraries like React just increases cognitive load instead of reducing it by being unnecessarily verbose for little benefit.

graboid 4y ago
If I build a desktop app using one of the above-mentioned technologies, there is almost nothing "distributed" about it. HTML, CSS, Javascript. Which is where 99% of my UI building happens. The only thing "distributed" what comes to my mind and what I think you mean is what would be an API call in the browser, to fetch some data that the frontend needs. The equivalent in Electron/Tauri/etc. is usually some bridging API that you can call instead. I never missed any GUI builder. Browser dev tools are phenomenal IMO, you can drag&drop elements across your layout, change any part of your styles and instantly see the effects, measure rendering performance, memory consumption, debug your Javascript or simulate different screen sizes. About React, nobody forces you to use it. There is a myriad of frontend frameworks, at all levels of complexity. If you feel your app is so simple that you don't need any framework, you can do without. Frameworks (and again, there is a huge world outside React!) came up because they make managing state in complex UIs easier.
- bitL 4y ago
  In Electron apps you still have the boundary between frontend and backend, that means it's in its core a distributed app. If you don't like GUI builder, that's a fair opinion, but I do and don't want to waste my time on textual descriptions of what is essentially visual, and don't want a Figma subscription to get some half-baked version of that either. Avoiding React equals to avoiding 95% frontend/fullstack jobs these days so it's only theoretical.