Comment by whizzter

4 days ago

Personally I love the web-tooling, they've abused the dynamicism of JS/TS for the benfit of developer experience to the point where others tools often feels cramping when wanting to do something really quickly.

And webviews are simple to start within some host language, I have my own mini-webview-host written in .NET that provides functions for file IO, file-selection dialogs,etc.

Outside of that, more serious seemingly still viable non-lowlevel (QT/GTK) non-web cross-platform options:

- Dart/flutter seems very popular, it's a new language to learn for most but seems to have been given the chance to mature and seems to be gaining.

- in the .NET world Avalonia (desktop focused, inheris a lot from WPF architecturally and has a paid crossplatform WPF shim)

- Also .NET, MAUI (better for more "mobile" like/focused designs).

- If you're doing games and are already rendering polygons, IMGui seems to be the go-to option.

- Lazarus (Pascal) seems to still carry the old VB/Delphi torch.

That said, what I'd love to see pesonally is for library developers to start looking at sane/fast ways to develop UI applications with modern language features to have non-insane state management. Either as thin shims over the existing lowlevel libraries or as first-class support.

C++ and Java has evolved a lot just in the past 10 years, as have some other languages.

But the web-focus seems to have left desktop UI development in a rut outside of new players for new languages.