Mhm... Install 300mb once to run any Java application or 300mb for each and every electron app.

Its an easy choice.

Then I have a read for you this Sunday: https://www.datagubbe.se/utildisks/

Dated 1993, so probably it deals with some advanced copy protection from impossible sectors? Idk

following every linux de/wm's interaction guidelines seems pretty hard

the omnipresent Qt

So weird. I spent more than two years of my career working on a Qt app (not by choice) but I've never met another human being who has ever even heard of Qt. Nothing else has ever made me so certain that I'm clinically insane.

My favorite thing about Qt was the use of C++ for the back end and Javascript for the UI layer. It lets companies take advantage of the, uh, four people in the world who are good with both languages.

Customizing the look, feel, interaction of elements, and general mechanics, seems like a toooon of effort. (It kinda seems like you’re not supposed to customize it.)

Sometimes all of this is there for a reason. I used to really hate standard Windows (and I still do) but it had one big advantage: everything was accessible, in the sense that it all worked very well for blind and vision-impaired people. Usually when people create their own custom look and feel etc. they never accommodate accessibility at all.

I remember some years ago when a version of MSDN came out that had clearly been developed entirely on enormously wide monitors. Despite word-wrapping being a problem that the programming world solved many decades ago, this version of MSDN had completely fucked it up and you could only read it on a normal laptop screen by scrolling left and right with the horizontal scroll bar for every line. I spent months copying every article I needed to read into Notepad.

That has its own set of problems with the big one is that it is spyware

Java is awful on multiple levels

It depends on what you are trying to do

Qt isn't bad and runs cross platform

Honesty Electron is fine as a concept

The problem lies with the implementation. I see no reason why many of these apps couldn't just be links to a website.

Oh my, I just had to puke a little bit.

Electron is broken in implementation

We need something like React native for desktop

Let's get you to bed grandma

Electron should just be a wrapper for the local web browser.

e

Lazarus, you're up! https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

Is it?

It is the devs. Management says they need it fast then the devs say "fuck you here's your browser tab app".

I deam of a dev job that would let me actually write a good app..

To add insult to injury, the demands are often really unclear. Changing something in an electron app is often pretty straight forward. Not so much in a C# or especially C++ app

Yeah, something better is welcome for sure.

Yes

It sucks on many different levels

It depends on what you are doing

Yeah, Just!

I was joking. Qt has its place and can be useful. But I believe the days of non-web based, rich clients is over. Because Qt is not really “platform independent” anymore. When Qt was invented, only GNU/Linux, OSX and Windows existed. Now we have mobile phones, tablets, ultrabooks/chromebooks, much more powerful browsers, smart watches. That’s why Qt is not something I would prefer, as I need my apps to run literally everywhere

I think that's what Tauri is trying to do

I wish I could get it to cross compile to my Amiga m68k architecture. (Object) Pascal used to be my favourite language.

Video doesn't load for me, alt links?

Meanwhile, I have to install my third freedesktop 1GB dependency for 4 flatpak apps. What I wouldn't give for a slim 100mb electron package... All my electron apps as appimages are less than 1gb total.

But hey, at least native apps are so much faster. I have to get out an atomic clock to really see those microseconds that Zed is saving me compared to VSCode. You can even use the extra battery you gain to do one extra Rust compilation from scratch!

the amount of ire CPU cycles / frames / watts it draws is overboard. Lol

(Trying to be funny not aggressive lol)

For real though, I think it's just because it epitomizes that "Hardware is fast now so throw sluggishly interpreted high-level code at it and don't even bother with optimization" mentality.

Like I remember when people would bash Python over this, but Electron apps make that feel way overblown now.

(Also Python did nothing wrong :( lol)

I'll admit I'm not versed enough as a developer to grasp this so I'll take your word for it.

... I'mma just build my cross platform programs in Godot and nobody can stop me. >:)

It is not quite a native binary, but the effect of not having to install java to run it is the same. Using jlink you can assemble a runtime image containing the java bytecode for the application and a custom runtime enviroment containing the parts of the the jre needed to run that program.

Yeah that makes sense given the language. So it'll be a fatter binary than typical for what's needed.

As if the Java app won't be even uglier than electron and still weigh in at 300 mb for each. Not to mention introducing security issues on your machine with the jre

There's a reason people stopped making consumer apps in Java

Uglier? Debatable as there are different UI Toolkits that can actually look beautiful and you don't have to reimplement controls like you would in an electron app.

And you certainly wouldn't introduce new security issues with different and outdated v8 engines that are bundled with your electron app, no sir.

I won't, Godot is perfectly cromulent.

Hah! Yeah, qt has some really neat interfacing. And it is in so many places you wouldn't expect it to be...

Ugh. Cancel reminder, ready to take my chances with rectal cancer...

Understandable

As an engineer, Swing is great! Granted, I wouldn't use it to deliver a polished UI to users.

The individual things themselves weren't really the issue. Swing was by far my favorite.

The issue was cross platform ui development. If you didn't target Java, swing wasn't viable.

Swing was by far my favorite.

Nice. My team constantly gripes about it but I'm all, "...it's a well designed UI toolkit...?" I can make it do anything. It took me weeks (as a newbie) to try to lay out UI components just so with the new hotness and at the end I had to give up and move on. It would've taken me five minutes to do it with Swing.

Swing is what all these xml layout tools have been trying to replicate, honestly. Some get close, but far too few.

It warmed my heart when GWT basically copied swing for its layout. Made that super easy to learn.