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0 pointsgameswithgo5y ago0 comments

It isn't your fault that you have to do this, it is that our industry hasn't created enough quality, easy to use, cross platform gui libraries for popular languages, such that the only viable place to turn is to use a whole web browser.

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8 comments · 3 top-level

qbasic_forever5y ago· 5 in thread

We've had about 60 years and multiple huge attempts at it, and IMHO HTML & CSS _are_ the easy to use cross-platform GUI platform. Nothing else stuck--flash, java swing, qt, etc. were all super capable and promising but failed to gain mass usage. HTML & CSS is the way. Nothing in existence has as much capability, developer usage and talent pool, accessibility and internationalization features, etc. A good GUI system is much more than just getting boxes and text on the screen.

bscphil5y ago

I suppose this depends on your point of view. QT has achieved broad acceptance as "the" cross platform solution among open source Linux-first applications, as well as much of the open source ecosystem more generally. (Open source being what it is means that there are many exceptions, obviously.)

For example, on my computer right now I have 55 applications that depend directly on qt5-base, not including libraries and parts of QT. This is also not including a ton of applications that depend indirectly on QT, including most every KDE desktop application, which depends through KDE's frameworks.

So while QT may not have caught on in commercial software development, I'd say calling it a failure depends very much on what software ecosystem you're in. You might argue that HTML has achieved "universal usage" for desktop apps in a way that QT has not, but I would have to disagree. I don't have a single HTML UI or Electron app on my computer, and I don't feel as though I've given anything up. In fact I simply haven't come across any of these apps that I felt like I needed.

So I might say that HTML has failed to gain mass usage on the platforms that matter to me. :-)

gameswithgoOP5y ago

I don't think HTML+CSS is the way because of innate goodness of them, but because the web led to so many people being expert at it, and so many tools being built around it, including a cross platform browser or too that are top notch to render it all.

At the very least a proper gui library could precompile all of that stuff so you aren't literally parsing HTML and CSS to render things, and HTML And CSS parsers don't need to be part of your running code. Nor a Javascript JIT, and runtime, etc.

qbasic_forever5y ago

I don't disagree either to be honest, but the reality is we live in a world where almost every business is dependent on a presence that shows up in web browsers. This puts enormous pressure and real dollars spent on making web browsers and the HTML & CSS ecosystem super fast, accessible, etc. Thousands of developers are trained every day how to make basic HTML & CSS experiences. Any UI system that throws all that away and tries to build up a similar ecosystem from scratch is going to be churning and churning for years.

Don't forget browsers are pretty spectacular runtimes. V8 and its JIT compiler is arguably one of the best runtimes of any language in the world. Sure the very first view of a page is going to do some parsing, etc. but as it runs it gets faster and faster with core functions and components compiled on the fly into platform machine code. The sandbox and security and encryption support in browsers is top notch and supremely battle-tested and hardened. With WASM now pretty mainstream we're starting to see entirely new frontend UIs coded in languages like C++, Go, Rust, etc. that are incredibly fast too. If you squint hard enough the browser is really no different than the JVM or .NET CLR these days--it just has 20 more years or so and an order of magnitude more developers working on improving it.

simias5y ago

I think you're right, but I'm not sure about "easy to use". It's only easy to use because everybody uses it, so as you point out there's a massive talent pool and massive resources.

As somebody who only started developing for the web a few years ago after a long time working with Qt, winforms, GTK and other "old school" native toolkits, I really don't find the web superior in terms of simplicity outside maybe of a few niches. You end up having to resort to dozens of external libraries to emulate the base functionality of something like Qt. And unless you want to go the transpiler way (which, admittedly, is incredibly common these days) you have to do it all is Javascript which is easy to pick up but a pretty huge liability in the long run IMO. It's just not a very good language, even if you stick to "the good parts".

jcelerier5y ago

> were all super capable and promising but failed to gain mass usage

Depends where you look. Plenty of hardware devices use Qt as their UI. Modern Mercedes-Benz and Ford cars, LG TVs UI, stuff like the Remarkable tablet or th Telegram chat app... The nice thing being that you can test the UI on whatever OS you're running. Also, i18n on the web ? Come on. It's terrible when compared to Qt tooling

eivarv5y ago

I don't think this is entirely true. Have you tried wxWidgets or even Qt?

In my experience, this is more about resources and economics ("reuse existing code" vs. having to learn something new).

hctaw5y ago

I didn't say I was shipping GUI software ;)

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