This got me thinking: My own experience with desktop development dates back to the late 90s using Turbo Pascal 6 in Delphi, and I'm out of the loop on modern practices. With the evolving landscape, I'm curious about what tools and workflows developers are actually using today.
Some questions to spark discussion:
- What programming languages and frameworks are popular for desktop apps? - Are there any go-to IDEs, build tools, or libraries that make development easier? - Do the above answers change if you care about code performance or efficiency (whatever that means to you)? - Is native desktop app development still viable as a career, or are most greenfield projects shifting to web-based alternatives?
I'd love to hear from folks with recent experience—success stories, pitfalls, and recommendations would be great. Thanks in advance for sharing!
Before that, handling files in the browser was cumbersome. You had to offer download and upload links for users to manage files. And handling whole directories was impossible.
But now web apps are like native software tools that you can use to edit and manage files on the file system.
And the bonus point is that what you build this way is fully functional on mobile too. Right away, without any changes. At least on Android.
Looks like Firefox does not support it currently.
Outside of work, I'm out in left field using Common Lisp for most of my projects, so I'm not sure how helfpul this is, but...
In the past, I used Qt4 because there was an amazing Common Lisp binding and it worked well on Linux, FreeBSD and OSX. It's increasingly hard to use Qt4 any more, though, and changes in the Qt project made the technique used by the Qt4 bindings impractical for Qt5 or Qt6 - at least that was my understanding when I looked into it.
For newer things I've tried LTK but don't really like the looks of it and I wouldn't say it's "modern". It seems to work across platform well enough, though, and for simple stuff it's okay.
More often than not I'm using a combination of the Slime tools in Emacs in combination with an GLFW/OpenGL window. Often I'll use the inspector to display data and make changes that show up in an OpenGL window, or run some commands in the REPL and pop up an image in an external viewer or load something in a browser. It only works for certain types of applications, and I won't even pretend it's practical for end users, but it works pretty well, and it's flexible as a developer.
I'm curious to see what other people say. It's been a while since I madea full blown GUI application.
When I wrote a WPF app at my last job, I write a micro MVVM framework. Basically just an implement ion of INotifyPropertyChanged on the model side and some extension methods to bind the properties to UI elements. It was as strongly typed as possible in WPF.
It was hard to do reasonably with qt4 already. The best solution would be to support the C++ ABI natively, but that's never going to happen.
Internally the “UI” team is tiny (basically me, a UI/Designer and one or two other part time engineers) and the productivity is astounding tbh
Knowing Google, this happening is almost a guarantee. You should consider moving to another framework with a longer shelf life.
I've been using Visual Studio Code and Github Copilot together, and it seems to work ok. I've not used it heavily, though, as I'm retired.
Here's my attempt from 2021: https://github.com/QotoQot/Octospace
However, I find The Qt Group's commercial licensing (and their tactics as reported by various people on HN) a little scary. If I were to go commercial, I think I would stick with LGPL Qt and link dynamically or give customers my object files for re-linking, because I get the impression that accepting a commercial Qt license could restrict my ability to use open-source Qt elsewhere. I suppose there might be some other way to safely navigate those waters, but from what I've read, The Qt Group has a reputation for making this far from hassle-free. It's not an immediate problem because I currently use Qt only for open-source and personal tools.
I have grown tired of C++, so I've been using Python to drive Qt. The bindings are very good, mirroring the C++ API so closely that I just use the C++ docs when I need to look something up.
I've also been watching for Qt bindings to other compiled languages, mainly for distributing non-Linux GUI apps more simply than Python allows. Such bindings often turn out to expose only Qt Quick, which lacks functionality that I sometimes need, but there are a few that expose Qt Widgets. For example, these Go bindings:
I hope we'll eventually see a cross-platform GUI toolkit rivaling Qt in a language more pleasant than C++ (and ideally easier to bind to other languages). The one being developed for internal use by the Zed editor has some promising ideas about how to render native-looking text, which I think is a good start:
Will come back next year :-(
<3
1. Download LÖVE from its website.
2. Download my app (as Lua source code).
It's not going to lead to Instagram-level downloads, but that's not the aim. My goal is to teach people a little at a time to be thoughtful about whom they trust to run code on their devices. Forcing people to take 2 steps hopefully has 2 benefits:
1. You start from day 1 to take baby steps in being mindful of how software is put together for you to use. It's not just a single hermetically sealed box. This part comes from one supplier, this part from another. Both can be modified, and require different skills to modify.
2. You start from day 1 to take baby steps in thinking about whom to trust. Here there are 2 separate projects that would be very hard to collude together. That limits at least the level of malicious stuff I can do.
Summary: I don't want a bunch of people blindly trusting me. I want a few people choosing mindfully to trust me.
In general, if you use a minority platform you have to assume it has a tiny minority testing it and so budget for there to be more bugs and so on. LÖVE itself is rock solid, but programs built on it may not be. So I try to minimize the number of layers of libraries I add atop it. So far that has meant I found it easier to just draw my own UI in all my programs.[1] I've only played with Slab a little bit myself.
If you use Slab, please do report bugs. I've done that in the past when I've used it. That's what it takes to make a minority platform more stable.
[1] Drawing all my own UI also keeps my download sizes small. For example, https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel is 400KB. If you take out 4 fonts and the extensive online help, the code itself is only 100KB. By comparison, Slab seems to be almost 1MB of code. But that's just me. I care a lot about being easy to download on slow internet connections, and less code seems more hackable. But I give up some creature comforts, and reasonable people will disagree with me about the value of a UI library.
Normally with the Windows DX12 backend, sometimes with the SDL+OpenGL backend if you want cross platform support.
Other frameworks are sort of disappearing. C++ all the way although some use it with C#.
I wouldn't really recommend a career out of it.
Too bad the hopes from the early Nokia adoption days got smashed by MS mole Elop and the later owners of Qt.
We were robbed of a future with lightweight and responsive native apps. Android pales in comparison.
Care to say why? I ask because that's what I use at work: C++ and Qt
Yes, I'd prefer Rust and Slint/Tauri.
But like a prostitute I don't do what I love, I do what pays the bills.
Ah, you like masochism I see. I bet you use it for your personal projects, but not at all for commercial projects. It’s just not there yet.
I do like working in it, though!
With that being said, I'd like to try the modern .NET stack sometime. Shame that the UI side of things is still largely Windows-only, and even Microsoft themselves don't know which UI framework they're using this week.
You can download and use a community edition of Delphi for free. The downside is insane licensing costs if you are making commercial software.
I an not sure how far Lazarus has come but I believe it to have the same or similar abilities and if free and libre.
Nowadays I definitely prefer Lazarus.
- What programming languages and frameworks are popular for desktop apps? - for me - Blazor Hybrid / MAUI / Avalonia UI / WinForms
- Are there any go-to IDEs, build tools, or libraries that make development easier? - I use MSVS 2022, VSCode for .NET, IntelliJ for $$$ at work. There are of course UI control libraries, I am using MudBlazor for Blazor WASM / Hybrid, other than that I use built-in controls that come with each framework. I try to use as little as possible of 3rd party libraries b/c my apps are security-sensitive.
- Do the above answers change if you care about code performance or efficiency (whatever that means to you)? - in my case no, I am able to find what I need in .NET ecosystem. Modern .NET supports ahead-of-time compilation compiling to native code, and that helps to reduce start-up time which is important for Desktop / CLI. Ironically, for a long running processes, like a web service, the just-in-time compilation sometimes produces code running faster than ahead-of-time compilation, b/c it learns most common execution paths at runtime, and is able to recompile on the fly, optimizing for most frequent execution paths, giving a non-trivial performance boost in some cases
- Is native desktop app development still viable as a career, or are most greenfield projects shifting to web-based alternatives - depends on the app/use case. For my project, desktop is the first class citizen, but I am building E2EE apps, i.e. end-to-end-encryption apps, aka client-side encryption, and native / Desktop / CLI is a better fit for E2EE in most of the cases compared to web apps. For those Web apps that I have it is still E2EE but in the browser (still client side encryption)
Borland had an amazing knack of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
It was one of the earliest and best textbook case of management screwing up a technical company.
I think it would be possible to have those advantages in JUCE/C++ without a webview tho. Maybe just moving to a declarative UI approach for positioning and styles with the ability to refresh (something like litehtml could be handy for that)?
- For C# I like AOT assemblies using Uno or Avalonia.
- For Go I like TCell (which does cross-platform console mode text GUIs [with cursor positioning, colours, mouse, etc]).
- If you're doing vibe coding I find it tends to work best with Electron.
- The big omission here is anything Python; I don't do desktop apps in Python so can offer nothing. Same for Ruby, though Hotwire Native looks interesting.
wxPython and PyQt are some options. PySide too. There are some other less-known ones too. I've not tried Kivy. There is also tkinter which comes built-in with Python.
IIRC, the Dropbox GUI client app was done with wxPython on both Linux and Windows.
Quite good, I've been building this Pomodoro:
https://github.com/reciperium/temporis/
I've also used nix to build the packages when possible.
One of the things I like about slint is that it has native components. They also have experimental support for Android and iOS.
The language is quite simple as well. Though it could benefit from something like flex
Still supported in latest .net versions.
I worked in WPF for a decade. I wouldn't go with it for a new project since it's Windows-only and doesn't support AOT.
At work we have a Blazor MAUI hybrid desktop app because it also has to run on the web. If we only needed a desktop app, I'd go with Avalonia.
[1] https://linklever.net/ [2] https://github.com/endurabyte/FitEdit
Rust + Egui for special cases like DAW plugins.
Been developing mobile apps for over 15 years. This is by far the best stack for developing mobile apps. Speed, total control, native UI's. Love it.
[1]: https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/cross-platform-tuis-are-ea...
For Mac only: new apps use Swift, legacy ones use Objective-C, both with AppKit.
Linux only: these are quite rare and there is a broad mix of them: C++, Java, etc.
Cross-platform: C++ with Qt seems to be the standard. Go and Rust seem to be rising. Rising UI libraries are Tauri, Slint and Iced. There are other alternatives like cross-platform .Net, Java or Flutter. But they don't look very solid and widely adopted.
Then there are other UI frameworks for some specific use cases (games, scientific applications, etc).
but now i'm reading through all the comments here and am eager to try all these options. let's see how claude is doing with these.. :]
Earlier I was HTMX, Jinja templates, Flask, Tailwind and little vanilla JS. It was too inelegant for my taste.
I am considering moving to either Swift, or JS/Svelete
What would you think are the pros and cons over various alternatives (like Flutter, Avalonia, Lazarus, etc.)
Thanks.
Rust as a statically linked library where it makes sense.
Caveat: This is immediate mode, so not suitable for all applications and preferences.
Would consider flutter for smaller apps as I had a great experience before.
