this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
125 points (96.3% liked)

Programming

17351 readers
339 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
snowe@programming.dev
Ategon@programming.dev
MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz
125
Why isn't there a way to make near-native desktop UIs that's similar in ease to browser and electron UIs? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 10 months ago by cyclohexane@lemmy.ml to c/programming@programming.dev
40 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

it seems ridiculous that we have to embed an entire browser, meant for internet web browsing, just to create a cross-platform UI with moderate ease.

Why are native or semi-native UI frameworks lagging so far behind? am I wrong in thinking this? are there easier, declarative frameworks for creating semi-native UIs on desktop that don't look like windows 1998?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] TehPers@beehaw.org 3 points 10 months ago

It's much easier to write an abstraction over one platform, an embedded chromium browser, than it is to write abstractions over several drastically different platforms. For most applications, the developers are satisfied with the performance and footprint anyway and see no value in maintaining a different application for the different platforms when it can all be written once with something like Electron.

Still, there are people out there trying to write cross-platform, native UI frameworks. For example, I believe that's what Slint is trying to do, although I've never tried it myself.