Comment by thayne
1 day ago
Native often means "not a wrapper around a webview".
If you define it as "using the widgets provided by the operating system", then "native" is by definition incompatible with "cross-platform." And what does that mean on Linux, where the operating system doesn't provide widgets? Are gtk and Qt not native?
Adding to this...
When discussing GUI toolkits, "native" should be understood to mean "native to the host's graphical environment".
"Native to the OS" might or might not be equivalent, depending on the OS and what one considers "OS" to mean. (Does it mean a kernel? A desktop distro? Something else?) Because of this ambiguity, it's not a very practical way to approach the discussion. Different people attach different meanings to that phrase.
Some frameworks are native to Qt. Others are native to Gtk. Practically none are native to Linux. ;)
I don't think "cross-platform" is incompatible with "native". It has been achieved more than once using toolkit wrappers, usually selected at build time.