I think this is often the perception - and I understand why, because I shared it for a very long time - but I don’t think it’s true.
Building a simple UI for multiple platforms may be somewhat more time consuming than a single cross-platform Electron implementation. This will scale with the complexity of the UI.
This particular application has about the simplest UI imaginable. Consume some keystrokes, render some rows of text. Implementing this is any native UI platform will not be hard - but it will reduce the memory footprint, rendering time, and application bundle size.
Native UI frameworks are actually really good at rendering simple applications on their platforms. There’s usually plenty of documentation and good development tools. Building an application using one of them is definitely different from web tech - but I don’t think it qualifies as hard. And I reckon it would be useful for more of us to experience as many different platforms as possible - it’s a great way to learn!
The native platforms backed by real money also have lots of official documentation, real GUI builders, high quality debuggers built into their IDE’s and one cardinal way/library to do something. The importance of all this stuff in speeding up things can’t be overstated.
Experience? I would much rather have the freedom, and reliability of a native platform than to deal with HTML’s limitations, poor performance, and having to worry about the „optimal rendering path” that’s basically black magick you have little control over.
HTML breaks in ways you won’t predict. Some things you’ll have to hack together so hard you’ll want to take a shower afterward. And it’s only a matter of time untill that piles up enough to justify using native UI from the start.
How is that a “real repo” and mine aren’t? The article this thread is about is written in Rust for the majority of the app. I linked to three cross-platform UI bindings/libraries for Rust that could’ve fairly quickly provided the same UI that the Electron portion provided. I get it some prefer Electron and that’s ok, but to say that cross-platform coding is inherently difficult otherwise is a bit of a stretch to me.
No you're not. These are cross-platform. Save for a few OS-specific things (not UI related, which would have been a problem with electron ayway), it's just about compiling it on a new OS to get it working.
Yes. What makes you think otherwise?