How to build a desktop app in 2022

The road is filled with dissatisfaction. I love desktop apps and developing at that layer but it’s clear that the segment has stagnated over the years.

QtWidgets - decent experience, lots of functionality out of the box. Rapid iteration is lackluster compared to web dev. Great docs. Less obvious “best practices”. Works well from C++ and Python. Distribution is annoying.

QML - Not much experience, didn’t attract me since less advanced widgets available.

Dear imgui- very fun to program using this lib. Can get decent visuals and functionality. Breath of fresh air to remove a layer of complexity. Start to miss some QoL features (animations, undo/redo, etc.). Low level, no docs (examples + reference docs), hard to style. C++ but has bindings in tons of languages.

WPF - decently powerful. Kind of stagnated and windows only. Can still produce solid UI. C#

Alternatives: Godot, Webview2, GTK, fltk

Flutter is the most obvious answer here to me.

Very modern, cross platform (windows, mac, linux, fuchsia, iOS, android, web and embedded devices), excellent tooling / developer experience, outputs to native compiled code, battle tested in a lot of real world scenarios against billions of dollars in revenue like Google’s Ads apps for example.

On desktop specifically, Ubuntu last year or two said they were going all in on providing first class Flutter support on Linux and would be using it as their new default for their own desktop apps starting with the installer in the recently released Ubuntu 22.04 (repo link here https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-desktop-installer)

Should be simple to pick up if you have a JS or even better good TS experience.

https://flutter.dev/ also here is a good charting library to get you started https://github.com/google/charts

If I was going to try using something new it would be Flutter/Dart.

If I was going to use something (old) that might be Qt, or something that I know from way back straight up Java Swing. For something big a framework like Eclipse RCP. Should be able to use Kotlin for these now at least.

Tauri is the new Electron.

Look at Tamagui if you want react native (via expo) + web (nextjs) it's still on beta but looks promising

The thread yesterday was pretty quiet IMHO

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31287939

C++ and Qt; all in one : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)

If you want to keep with the browser based rendering, I've used this for a couple side / internal projects: https://github.com/webview/webview

Works quite well for normal things, but 3d webgl stuff can go a bit haywire.

Recent evaluation (not mine) can be found here: https://github.com/benjamin-thomas/wails-elm-template#note-o...

This user ends up with Wails + Elm. Some further discussion on his choice here: https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/fancy-some-gui-programming-...

If your visualization needs are covered by https://elm-charts.org/ then this might be a fitting combo for you.

Take a look at qt

Electron is much better in my experience than most other cross platform toolkits. It gets better with troubleshooting as you use it more.

Lazarus is a cross platform and open source GUI builder based on Free Pascal. If you can handle begin and end instead of { }, you'll get used to it fairly quickly. As a bonus, it does strings that you never have to allocate or deallocate, and can handle a gigabyte of data.

I've run Lazarus on a Raspberry Pi Zero W (the old one), Linux, and Windows.

I wrote my desktop app in this winter with WinUI 3 Project Reunion in hope it will be available on linux soon. Currently this supperior project with large list on anccestors WPF, UWP and Xamarin can be compiled to Windows, MacOs and Android without any code and layout changes.

I would go for whatever is native on each platform (on Windows, WPF is still the best way, ignore anything WinRT/UWP related), as what bonus points are concerned, Qt would be my answer.

If staying with Web stack is relevant, then PWAs.

Tauri if you are already with Rust.

Here are some open source app built with Tauri

https://github.com/tauri-apps/awesome-tauri

Do you want to support all of Windows, Linux and macOS? If so, maybe QT? If not, you have some other options. E.g. macOS has it’s own proprietary libraries you can target.

Godot https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24043427

If you are using electron for cross-platform, consider that you are already on the right track from the available options. Everything else is much worse.

I use Lazarus

But it is not modern. It is like Delphi was 20 years ago

If you're ok with electron's size, then you could look at dotnet + avaloniaui. WPF-like and very portable, desktop and mobile. http://avaloniaui.net/

I'm mentioning the size because dotnet itself will take some space unless some other app already installed it. Or you can try native compilation with it.

What kind of visualization are you talking about? Charts, ray tracing, video?

Flutter. It gets the job done.

ImGui

https://github.com/epezent/implot

no wonder desktop apps sucks, look at the suggestion people are making in the replies... i am concerned, ashamed, and very sad