It's not arguing in circles. It's just asking you for evidence that an app like Slack would be better if it were implemented in Qt or a similar library. If there is literally no example of this having been done successfully, how can you be so confident that it would work great?

>Toolkits like Qt get less and less mindshare because Electron is desired and is encouraged by employers.

But why is it desired? I've used Qt before (a long time ago) and know enough C++ to be dangerous. I'd still avoid using Qt simply because I already know how to make UI's in HTML+CSS. I can't say that replacing those tools with a manually-constructed C++ object graph – or with an unfamiliar markup language (QML) – strikes me as an appealing option. Most of the people carping about Electron apps on HN don't want to make a UI in Qt either! It is becoming one of these legendary magical technologies (like Lisp) that is much praised and yet too little used for its flaws to be common knowledge.

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pdimitar 7 months ago | parent [-]

> If there is literally no example of this having been done successfully, how can you be so confident that it would work great?

Past experiences. I've seen much smoother and faster apps more than 20 years ago. Surely they weren't using black magic.

> But why is it desired?

Because it is slightly quicker to start an app with it and because people want to have a web variant of it (runnable in the browser) if/when necessary. Those are actual selling points and I agree with them wholeheartedly -- I object to Electron's lagginess however. They can and they should do better.

> I'd still avoid using Qt simply because I already know how to make UI's in HTML+CSS.

Well yes, that's one of the factors -- people default to what they already know. But zero mention is given to the numerous problems with the DOM model of making UIs as well... a topic way too big for me to have any desire to delve in, again.

Inertia. A bad thing starts being used widely because of 2-3 desirable traits, and when it gains enough critical mass nobody wants to criticize it.

Well, I do.

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foldr 7 months ago | parent [-]

>I've seen much smoother and faster apps more than 20 years ago

Me too, but they didn't have all the whizzbang UI features that you get for free from a web stack. I could live without most of those, but users do expect all that stuff to work these days.

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pdimitar 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

I am one of those users. I do my job as a programmer to the best of my ability and I am not allowing lags for as much as humanly possible (sometimes you can't do anything about a slow 3rd party API though). They should do the same. I have no sympathy for sloppy work, and Slack and Teams are in the top two spots there.

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foldr 7 months ago | parent [-]

Sloppy work and bad code are orthogonal issues to choice of technology. There are some sloppily written Qt apps out there too.

If the Slack devs are as sloppy as you say, then we ought to be thankful that they’re writing JS and not C++!

Lag is something that some people care about a lot. I actually think that most users don’t notice it or care very much, up to a certain point.

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pdimitar 7 months ago | parent [-]

> There are some sloppily written Qt apps out there too.

I specifically asked not to focus on examples but OK, I guess you really had to get it off your chest. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The topic was not "Electron vs. Qt" at all.

> I actually think that most users don’t notice it or care very much, up to a certain point.

Good for them, to me it's a mood and productivity killer. And no I'll not change my mind on this, ever.

Broader point is: the people who worked on Electron, Slack etc. should have really done better. But I have witnessed how job security almost always leads to sloppy work.

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rubymamis 7 months ago | parent [-]

Actually, the people who created Electron (and the code editor Atom), themselves abandoned it to create a performant code editor called Zed - with its own GUI toolkit based on Rust.

	▲	pdimitar 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		Case in point / point proven then. :D I didn't know they were the same. Fascinating actually, thanks for making me aware of it!

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rubymamis 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

What kind of UI feature are you speaking of? I would love to see how easy it'd be to do in QML.