At least it seems like a lot more apps are cross-platform than before. I wouldn't call the native devs lazy for not making a Mac version of their Windows app.

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pjmlp 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Agreed, yet back in the day we even managed to do that with applications being written in Assembly, in some cases.

Uphill both ways, should be easy for a company doing C compilers with LLMs.

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codebje 27 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Early games frequently took the approach of inventing an interpreted machine code in which the bulk of the game would be written, with an assembly interpreter that would need to be rewritten for each target IA and modified for the specific peripheral mixes of each target machine.

The approach runs slower than a game written directly in assembly, but the cost to port to different architectures is much lower.

Sort of like Electron trades off native performance and look-and-feel to make multi-platform apps much more achievable.

IMO the OS vendors failed everyone by refusing to even attempt to agree on a common API for UI development, paving the way for web browsers to become the real OS and, ultimately, embedded browsers to be the affordable and practical way to be cross platform.

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paulryanrogers 13 minutes ago | parent [-]

Except the OS's don't even ship a consistent enough browser engine. (Standards be damned.) So apps ship their own browser over and over again.

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zadikian 8 minutes ago | parent [-]

Yeppp. Is there no way for Electron apps to use a shared engine if one is available?

	▲	paulryanrogers 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I think Tauri tries this approach.

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carefree-bob 22 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Honestly I'm grateful to apps that otherwise wouldn't be available outside of windows.