Qt is native, if you talk about running compiled and linked code that directly accesses native resources (C++ will work directly with the Apple OS).

It is its own application framework (windows, buttons, labels, etc.), but, from what I can see, it does a damn good job of using native system resources, where possible.

The answer to the OP is "it depends." There's no "Philosopher's Stone" for cross-platform development. I'd say a significant number of applications could benefit from Qt. A smaller number, from other hybrid systems. A lot of good development tools are Qt-based, and I like them fine.

I have no experience with mobile Qt, though. Might be a different kettle of fish.

I write native Apple, using Swift, and native frameworks, like AppKit, UIKit, and WatchKit. I have not yet started working extensively with SwiftUI, but I like what I see (except the documentation).

I feel that true native development will always deliver the best UX, but, for many applications, the difference may not be worth the extra cost.

Eh, I don't think it's always obvious - for instance Visual Studio Code I would never have guessed was an Electron app.

It might not be obvious if you have a high-powered dev computer. It's very obvious if you have decade-old mid-range hardware (like me) or five-year-old low-end hardware (like millions of users).

"I don't know what you're talking about, Electron is fast on my machine." makes about as much sense as "The application runs on my machine." Other people do not use your machine.

Yeah but the claim was just that it was flatly obvious which apps were electron.

If the claim is just “it’s obvious which apps are electron if you have a decade old mid-range PC” then it’s not quite as bold of a statement.

That distinction of "flatly obvious" versus "obvious on a decade-only mid-range PC" seems to be pedantry. The parent comment doesn't say "flatly", for instance. In fact, it says "I find" which suggests personal experience, which would then mean that they weren't making a generalizable ("flatly obvious") claim.

Regardless, choosing the average consumer PC for your country (including the lower-class) is a much more reasonable benchmark than a high-end (your?) computer - and it seems more likely that tssge's machines (or mine) are representative of that average device than yours are.

I don't think that the statement was meant to be "bold" - it's pretty well-known that Electron performs extremely poorly on low-end devices, and the main reason why there's contention is because developers think that everyone has better computers than they actually do.

Well it’s not extremely obvious to me that VSCode is an electron app on my low-to-mid range laptop, but maybe I’m just an idiot.

Or maybe, more likely, the prevalence of electron apps lowered the average expectations?

Care to say specs of the lap?

When comparing on my machine, VSCode has much more latency than Qt apps for e.g. selecting text, reprocessing syntax coloration..

There are a few places where it's obvious VS Code isn't a native Mac app. For example drag & drop between apps doesn't work as it should.

(When initiating a drag, VS Code steals active app focus and brings its windows to front. It should stay in the background so that you can drag content into another app. This is a behaviour that views in Cocoa applications just inherit automatically.)

> (When initiating a drag, VS Code steals active app focus and brings its windows to front. It should stay in the background so that you can drag content into another app. This is a behaviour that views in Cocoa applications just inherit automatically.)

This is a good design. It's very dumb that on other OSes initiating dragging steals focus and often hides where you want to drop.

Even on a very powerful modern machine you could probably tell the difference by looking at "abnormal" RAM usage.