2020, Language and Framework for Cross Platform Dev (Especially Desktop)
I'm building a certain project and even though I'm a little biased towards just developing it for the Mac since I don't want to write and/or maintain 3 repositories for it , I'd like to know what HN community thinks would be a good selection right now
Flutter supports iOS and Android fully and beta support for Web, Windows and Mac all from a single code base.
It has a pretty awesome developer experience and for me is the clear winner for Cross Platform Dev.
Qt, because it has reasonably mature bindings in most languages you'd want to use. The bindings for Python seem the most mature though I have used the Golang bindings with reasonable success as well.
Back end in portable C or C++. Front end using the native OS GUI features. Compile separately for each platform. Many developers may not be a fan of this, but it's the best kind of cross platform for the users. If you need something of heirloom quality on the front-end it's the way to go.
But if front-end GUI widgets literally are your app or a high % of it, then this falls apart. You're basically maintaining 3 separate apps at that point.
This is something I've often wondered and don't have a great answer for. Ideally, I'd like to use a statically-typed, garbage collected (maybe reference counted/managed) language.
There used to be Adobe AIR, JavaFX, Silverlight. Now we have Electron, Qt, maybe Flutter soon. Is Eclipse RCP or Netbeans still viable?
For desktop across Windows/Mac/Linux without further context given: Qt would be my default answer
Electron works great if done right (see Visual Studio Code).