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I just wish its cross-platform UIs weren't such a mess. Particularly with its MVCish implementation, it was like it couldn't decide what it wanted to be. I rea

I just wish its cross-platform UIs weren't such a mess. Particularly with its MVCish implementation, it was like it couldn't decide what it wanted to be. I really really wish there was a good, straightforward desktop GUI for .Net that simply worked crossplatform and wasn't a complete pain in the ass to program.

creshal 3y ago
In their defence, does any other language have one, these days? The landscape hardly looks good, which is how electron et al. got so popular to begin with.
- collaborative 3y ago
  Java and Python have a few. I still don't get how electron got so popular. It's always been pretty straightforward to ship an app with a self-contained Java runtime, much the same as electron ships with v8. Java GUIs have always been worse than c++ ones, but still.. much better than electron I'd say
  - creshal 3y ago
    And now try to get either to work mobile, or in a browser, or at least try to share frontend code between them. That's where electron shines, and all the "classic" frameworks really don't. QtQuick and JavaFX kiiiind of work for at least some platforms, but it's fairly rough all considered, even compared to the inelegant brute force solution of electron. I'd put my money on the competing "electron, but smarter" solutions that keep bubbling up, rather than any language-centric framework.
    - pdntspa 3y ago
      I hate that we are completely enamored with browsers. Desktop apps and browser webapps are different platforms, with different methodologies and motifs. I hate hate hate it when a desktop app looks and acts like a web app.
    - collaborative 3y ago
      I wish that CodenameOne could have been the norm instead of Electron. Unfortunatrly, its desktop port never matched its mobile one in terms of functionality (still uses JavaFX for web views). I still prefer it over Electron where web views are not required i.e. nowhere
  - pdntspa 3y ago
    pySide6 has been a dream for me, it 'just works' and QT is quite robust. I am currently fucking with Java via GraalVM, and packaging my app for distribution has been absolute hell: jlink throws errors. jpackage somehow gets stuck in an infinite loop that generates a directory tree of seemingly infinite depth (so deep that even Explorer can't delete it) GraalVM native-image can't complete and throws all sorts of weird error messages Trying to modularize the app has been hell too, it seems like every one of your dependencies needs to be modularized as well? And like all I am using is Swing, FlatLaf, and MigLayout :( How the hell are people getting apps running in a standalone environment? I really like Java the language, but getting a desktop app running on it in 2023 is a nightmare.
    - Capricorn2481 3y ago
      I don't know anything about the QT on python as a runtime. Is it supposed to be just as fast since it's bindings to C++, or is it noticeably slower?
      - pdntspa 3y ago
        I haven't done anything terribly performance-sensitive with it, but what I have written has performed extremely well. My app starts up to its main window instantly (which SHOULD be table stakes...)
    - vips7L 3y ago
      > I really like Java the language, but getting a desktop app running on it in 2023 is a nightmare. This is honestly because you are taking the hard path and trying to do AOT compilation. Just use Swing with HotSpot. Native Image isn't meant for GUI applications and Swing internally uses a TON of reflection. Using jlink and jpackage with HotSpot has been trivial in my experience.
      - pdntspa 3y ago
        I'll look into that, thanks
  - booleandilemma 3y ago
    I think you had a massive number of exclusively JS developers out there who couldn't build a UI outside of a website but wanted to. Then Electron came along and gave them that power. That's how it got so popular, imo.
- pdntspa 3y ago
  Lazarus for FreePascal, write your code hit compile and get a nice EXE that starts up on Mac/Windows/Linux
  - Capricorn2481 3y ago
    I think you can always train devs, but lots of companies will avoid Lazarus/Delphi like the plague
akgoel 3y ago
They should have fixed up Wine to run Winforms flawlessly, and it would have solved the cross-platform desktop problem.
- pdntspa 3y ago
  <3 WinForms
mathverse 3y ago
There is not and wont be. MS will commoditize apps to bake as many features as possible as fast enough as possible using some bastardized Electron crap.
piaste 3y ago
Avalonia + FuncUI (for a MVU design) seems to have a lot of fans.
strich 3y ago
I would say Blazor is really very very good now. One of the most awesome things about it is that your skill with it transfers almost directly between a desktop app, web API, or web site. All the code is almost the same.
- Someone1234 3y ago
  Blazor is just history repeating itself. This is Web Forms with a shiny coat of paint and the "magic" this time is WebAssembly and a different proprietary web interface that is undebuggable. I've heard this "Microsoft has finally created a completely cross platform UI framework" like twenty times...
  - nu5500 3y ago
    It is nothing like Web Forms (I've built dozens of Web Forms and Blazor apps so I know), and WASM is just one delivery vehicle for it. You can also render it server side or locally in-process in a full .net runtime (no WASM needed). The debuggability for the WASM runtime has improved alot as well since .net 7.
viraptor 3y ago
Not first-party, but AvaloniaUI is doing pretty well in the cross platform department.
- 9cb14c1ec0 3y ago
  AvaloniaUI is miles ahead of any other cross platform library that I've ever used. It actually looks good!
  - pdntspa 3y ago
    I forgot to mention that I was referring to Avalonia, but when I tried to write something relatively simple beyond the music-player demo app, I got lost in the weeds extremely quickly. Avalonia needs a lot of work on its documentation, there are huge gaps, the quality is really inconsistent, and its abstractions fall apart really quickly
Mountain_Skies 3y ago
The Windows only desktop UI is a huge mess too. It reminds me of Babbage and his Difference Engine that could never be finished because part way through, he'd come up with "even better" ideas and start a new one.
HumblyTossed 3y ago
UI frameworks are a heavy lift, more-so to be cross-platform. Let's say someone tries, but it's not to your liking? I mean, there can't be 12 different frameworks, that's not sustainable.
- pdntspa 3y ago
  I am really flexible in terms of a toolkit's ergonomics. But I am running into situations where things just straight up don't work (Java/graalVM), or that I need to implement some really basic interaction and there is no guidance in the documentation and the abstractions don't make any sense. (Avalonia) And that's assuming it even compiles or packages. So far the only winner has been QT (via pyside6 for me)
  - HumblyTossed 3y ago
    I get it. And I completely agree on Avalonia. Personally, I'm not a big fan of that style programming where xml-ish glues stuff together. Makes hunting down errors a nightmare.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    What doesn’t work with java/graalvm?
    - pdntspa 3y ago
      I outlined my issues in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38266151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38266151 Someone suggested switching the JVM to hotspot and using jlink/jpackage, I am going to give that a shot
      - kaba0 3y ago
        Depending on what you want, there might not be too much point in going native. Also, it is unfortunately true that GUI stuff is not yet well-handled by Graal AOT.
lewispollard 3y ago
Not a conventional option, but I've built a few (non-game) GUI applications using Godot game engine + C#. Works great, intuitive once you get the hang of the UI system, fully cross platform (for 3.x anyway - Godot 4 still has a few unsupported platforms - android, web, ios - android support is ready for next release, ios has a PR that I haven't checked up on but I believe it was also nearly ready. Just web that is lagging last I checked.)

creshal 3y ago

In their defence, does any other language have one, these days? The landscape hardly looks good, which is how electron et al. got so popular to begin with.

collaborative 3y ago
Java and Python have a few. I still don't get how electron got so popular. It's always been pretty straightforward to ship an app with a self-contained Java runtime, much the same as electron ships with v8. Java GUIs have always been worse than c++ ones, but still.. much better than electron I'd say
- creshal 3y ago
  And now try to get either to work mobile, or in a browser, or at least try to share frontend code between them. That's where electron shines, and all the "classic" frameworks really don't. QtQuick and JavaFX kiiiind of work for at least some platforms, but it's fairly rough all considered, even compared to the inelegant brute force solution of electron. I'd put my money on the competing "electron, but smarter" solutions that keep bubbling up, rather than any language-centric framework.
  - pdntspa 3y ago
    I hate that we are completely enamored with browsers. Desktop apps and browser webapps are different platforms, with different methodologies and motifs. I hate hate hate it when a desktop app looks and acts like a web app.
  - collaborative 3y ago
    I wish that CodenameOne could have been the norm instead of Electron. Unfortunatrly, its desktop port never matched its mobile one in terms of functionality (still uses JavaFX for web views). I still prefer it over Electron where web views are not required i.e. nowhere
- pdntspa 3y ago
  pySide6 has been a dream for me, it 'just works' and QT is quite robust. I am currently fucking with Java via GraalVM, and packaging my app for distribution has been absolute hell: jlink throws errors. jpackage somehow gets stuck in an infinite loop that generates a directory tree of seemingly infinite depth (so deep that even Explorer can't delete it) GraalVM native-image can't complete and throws all sorts of weird error messages Trying to modularize the app has been hell too, it seems like every one of your dependencies needs to be modularized as well? And like all I am using is Swing, FlatLaf, and MigLayout :( How the hell are people getting apps running in a standalone environment? I really like Java the language, but getting a desktop app running on it in 2023 is a nightmare.
  - Capricorn2481 3y ago
    I don't know anything about the QT on python as a runtime. Is it supposed to be just as fast since it's bindings to C++, or is it noticeably slower?
    - pdntspa 3y ago
      I haven't done anything terribly performance-sensitive with it, but what I have written has performed extremely well. My app starts up to its main window instantly (which SHOULD be table stakes...)
  - vips7L 3y ago
    > I really like Java the language, but getting a desktop app running on it in 2023 is a nightmare. This is honestly because you are taking the hard path and trying to do AOT compilation. Just use Swing with HotSpot. Native Image isn't meant for GUI applications and Swing internally uses a TON of reflection. Using jlink and jpackage with HotSpot has been trivial in my experience.
    - pdntspa 3y ago
      I'll look into that, thanks
- booleandilemma 3y ago
  I think you had a massive number of exclusively JS developers out there who couldn't build a UI outside of a website but wanted to. Then Electron came along and gave them that power. That's how it got so popular, imo.
pdntspa 3y ago
Lazarus for FreePascal, write your code hit compile and get a nice EXE that starts up on Mac/Windows/Linux
- Capricorn2481 3y ago
  I think you can always train devs, but lots of companies will avoid Lazarus/Delphi like the plague

akgoel 3y ago

They should have fixed up Wine to run Winforms flawlessly, and it would have solved the cross-platform desktop problem.

pdntspa 3y ago
<3 WinForms

mathverse 3y ago

There is not and wont be. MS will commoditize apps to bake as many features as possible as fast enough as possible using some bastardized Electron crap.

piaste 3y ago

Avalonia + FuncUI (for a MVU design) seems to have a lot of fans.

strich 3y ago

I would say Blazor is really very very good now. One of the most awesome things about it is that your skill with it transfers almost directly between a desktop app, web API, or web site. All the code is almost the same.

Someone1234 3y ago
Blazor is just history repeating itself. This is Web Forms with a shiny coat of paint and the "magic" this time is WebAssembly and a different proprietary web interface that is undebuggable. I've heard this "Microsoft has finally created a completely cross platform UI framework" like twenty times...
- nu5500 3y ago
  It is nothing like Web Forms (I've built dozens of Web Forms and Blazor apps so I know), and WASM is just one delivery vehicle for it. You can also render it server side or locally in-process in a full .net runtime (no WASM needed). The debuggability for the WASM runtime has improved alot as well since .net 7.

viraptor 3y ago

Not first-party, but AvaloniaUI is doing pretty well in the cross platform department.

9cb14c1ec0 3y ago
AvaloniaUI is miles ahead of any other cross platform library that I've ever used. It actually looks good!
- pdntspa 3y ago
  I forgot to mention that I was referring to Avalonia, but when I tried to write something relatively simple beyond the music-player demo app, I got lost in the weeds extremely quickly. Avalonia needs a lot of work on its documentation, there are huge gaps, the quality is really inconsistent, and its abstractions fall apart really quickly

Mountain_Skies 3y ago

The Windows only desktop UI is a huge mess too. It reminds me of Babbage and his Difference Engine that could never be finished because part way through, he'd come up with "even better" ideas and start a new one.

HumblyTossed 3y ago

UI frameworks are a heavy lift, more-so to be cross-platform. Let's say someone tries, but it's not to your liking? I mean, there can't be 12 different frameworks, that's not sustainable.

pdntspa 3y ago
I am really flexible in terms of a toolkit's ergonomics. But I am running into situations where things just straight up don't work (Java/graalVM), or that I need to implement some really basic interaction and there is no guidance in the documentation and the abstractions don't make any sense. (Avalonia) And that's assuming it even compiles or packages. So far the only winner has been QT (via pyside6 for me)
- HumblyTossed 3y ago
  I get it. And I completely agree on Avalonia. Personally, I'm not a big fan of that style programming where xml-ish glues stuff together. Makes hunting down errors a nightmare.
- kaba0 3y ago
  What doesn’t work with java/graalvm?
  - pdntspa 3y ago
    I outlined my issues in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38266151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38266151 Someone suggested switching the JVM to hotspot and using jlink/jpackage, I am going to give that a shot
    - kaba0 3y ago
      Depending on what you want, there might not be too much point in going native. Also, it is unfortunately true that GUI stuff is not yet well-handled by Graal AOT.

lewispollard 3y ago

Not a conventional option, but I've built a few (non-game) GUI applications using Godot game engine + C#. Works great, intuitive once you get the hang of the UI system, fully cross platform (for 3.x anyway - Godot 4 still has a few unsupported platforms - android, web, ios - android support is ready for next release, ios has a PR that I haven't checked up on but I believe it was also nearly ready. Just web that is lagging last I checked.)