I'm fully in support of cross platform frameworks, I just hate the Electron approach of taking the worst parts of a browser and putting it all into a gigantic, ran gobbling monstrosity.

There are good "non-native" frameworks - Qt comes to my mind first, but Flutter and the now seemingly revived WPF are also good contenders. Those are pretty great.

You can also do Electron well (VsCode), but almost no devs do it, which makes me question whether doing it well might require just as much effort as using something else.

Well, the anti-Electron argument is that you're not necessarily doing it "three times for three times the cost." If you designed your app with the intention of being cross-platform to start with, you're writing it to have some kind of platform abstraction layer. The bulk of most applications isn't going to change.

That's undoubtedly still more expensive than doing everything Electron, sure. But it's going to produce a nicer application: lower resources, faster performance, working better with platform-specific features (e.g., macOS's Services menu). Maybe that's not worth it for all applications, but if Electron-style frameworks that lock their applications to the lowest common denominators become the norm, the overall quality of software drops.

I can do that only once with Qt, and have perfectly simple, beautiful, accessible apps.

I have no idea how this whole idea of doing something 3 times gained any momentum.

Do people not realize that you can use cross platform C++ libraries and essentially get the same program to compile on three different platforms, then just write it once? It really isn't that difficult. Use Qt, or Juce, or FLTK, the standard library and a couple of cross platform libraries for things like networking and you are in the clear.

The idea that anyone is actually maintaining three separate versions of a program is completely detached from reality.

> Doing this 3 times for 3 times the cost, as opposed to once some sacrifices is the obvious reason for this widespread adoption.

Are there any stats that back this up? It wouldn't surprise me if it was more than 3 times the cost given you'll likely have a larger team to coordinate.