Fair points, generally, but LoC and deadline arguments still kicking my ass. I'm counting days, not hours, that we are spending on magic issues instead of programming our direct business. No rant, I have an example right before me.

Our CEO, also programmer in distant past, took his macbook, asked me "where do I get Xcode", and in his free time did anything we did in web, including animations, itunes-like header/progress area, etc. With my "intensive kickstart", obviously, but the shocking fact is that he never touched Objective-C, Cocoa, AppKit and HTTP. Never. In. His. Life. (Though he has very strong background of sockets, threads, C, widget frameworks, coreutils, evaluation models and general software engineering). It took about a week or two in between of management and negotiations to simply write that thing by all canons.

I don't think we'll hire another frontend master on the middle of the road anyway, but that has something to do with complexity, not competence.

(Fun thing, he started with Swift but quickly "downgraded" to Objective-C, because Swift was getting in his way too much with no clear benefit.)

> When I tried those things, I had a hard time making an hello world app in two hours because of dependency/build/tooling issues.

I'd be interested to know how you tried.

For instance, for GTK:

https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/gtk-getting-started....

For Qt, the IDE itself comes with examples that can be built and run in two clicks.

Or maybe you want to use python ?

  virtualenv --no-site-packages .
  source bin/activate
  pip3 install pyqt5 
  echo "import sys
  from PyQt5.QtWidgets import QApplication, QPushButton

  if __name__ == '__main__':    
    app = QApplication(sys.argv)

    w = QPushButton('Hello world')
    w.show()
    
    sys.exit(app.exec_())" > main.py
  python3 main.py

I fail to see how this is more complicated than using npm or bower to fetch the relevant libraries.

It's great that Qt works with virtualenv and pip, Wx does too.

This is a quite recent phenomenon and to be applauded.

Minus sides -

Neither of these work with pypy yet (ideally the bindings would be rewritten using cffi for best benefit).

The downloads on these are quite big, but maybe this isn't the end of the world.

Gtk still doesn't work with pip like that yet.

Pyimgui may be worth a look if you want a small download that works everywhere, though it does look like it's own thing.

Our node_modules are 100Mb too, not counting a browser itself. Gtk recently quit building for MSW at all and relies on MSYS2, and it works now via 'gi', like any gir-enabled libraries, no custom wrappers needed. I ran complex Gtk3 Windows widget galleries last month, for Lua and Python at least.