If you build a cross-platform UI framework, it'll probably end up looking a bit ugly and custom on every platform (eg Java Swing). Making a cross-platform UI toolkit that looks native everywhere is an insane amount of work, because different platforms have very different UI toolkits, with different built-in components and different platform conventions. This problem becomes 10x harder if you want to make it work on mobile as well.
Some people try anyway - and bless their cotton socks. But electron (and arguably Qt) are the closest we've got. And even then, most electron apps seem to be full of custom components.
QT is not bad and I used it for a small project. But it follows native so I'm not sure how to go back to native Win2000 style.
The VB6/Delphi era (called at the time RAD for Rapid Application Development) was oriented around proprietary UI and component frameworks. They were planned out a long way in advance and solved a lot of problems up front, but, they were tied to Windows and then you had to buy the dev tools on top.
These days people usually want to write web apps if they aren't doing mobile. The web as a UI framework is basically evolved rather than designed. The features you need to support RAD don't exist. Moreover the web UI community would view them as bad practice!
RAD tools were typified by a few things:
1. A standard way to define components that is statically reflectable (so you can populate property and event editors), and get documentation on the fly, etc.
2. MVC: a standard way to separate code from layout.
3. Layout management that's integrated with the component hierarchy.
4. A standard toolbox of high quality, high effort components.
5. A marketplace for components (which means they need to be distributable in binary form).
The web has none of this and isn't going to any time soon. For example, there's no agreement on how components work. React has one or more different solutions, Web Components is a different one, Vue yet another. MVC has been abandoned: React doesn't know anything about that. Code and layout are intermingled together. JavaScript is dynamically typed, largely reflection-free language. You can't automatically work out what the props are for a React component short of parsing the source code. You can't easily distribute proprietary components either because there's no way to enforce licensing (so a lot of users wouldn't pay, in reality).
And then there's the components. Browsers don't provide good enough components out of the box, unlike Windows-oriented RAD tools, so devs have to invent their own. Then React makes things worse by conflating theming with the component library. The result is that every web app has its own unique set of widgets with its own unique set of limitations and bugs, very few of which ever reach a high quality level. Widget development is expensive, which is why RAD tooling centralized it and supported a marketplace, so devs could amortize out the cost of writing widgets across many projects. The whole React/Jetpack Compose approach basically spurns all of that and says if you want to change the way your app looks you get to redevelop the widgets from scratch. And everyone does want that, so there are floods of duplicated work that's open sourced and then abandoned, but nothing ever gets critical mass.
> 1. A standard way to define components that is statically reflectable (so you can populate property and event editors), and get documentation on the fly, etc.
This was what I really loved about Visual Basic back in the day. Everything is within clicks -- even with the legacy IDE it still feels slick.
Problem is, the multitude of platforms, screen sizes, capability sets etc. that we must support in practice make a very compelling case for a unified runtime, which ended up being the current web tech turducken clusterfuck we have today.
If the CPUs were slower, hovewer... one can only wish.
if [ "$os" = "Darwin" ]; then
arch="universal"
os="macos"
elif [ "$os" = "Linux" ]; then
os="linux"
else
echo "Unsupported OS."
exit 1
fi
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28978086
What mess are we in because of POSIX?
The nice thing about windows and macOS back in the day was that the programs we ran were all written with the same native UI toolkit. All the controls matched between applications. Applications were small and efficient - binary sizes and memory usage were in the megabyte range. Any program written like that today starts up instantly, and is incredibly responsive.
But last I checked, Hello world in electron is ginormous. It uses about 100mb of memory. It takes time to start up. Vscode and Spotify are great but they don’t look or feel native. It is legitimately great that people now ship apps for Linux. But we’ve lost platform cohesion in the trade.
So, so what if tigerbeetle is written for Linux? I’m ok with the developers choosing not to pay the cross platform tax.
pub fn monotonic(self: *Self) u64 {
const m = blk: {
if (is_windows) break :blk monotonic_windows();
if (is_darwin) break :blk monotonic_darwin();
if (is_linux) break :blk monotonic_linux();
@compileError("unsupported OS");
};Adding freebsd support should be pretty easy. If it supports darwin, it'll probably already have an implementation built on top of freebsd's kqueue. Its probably just a case of wiring it up to use kqueue when built for freebsd.
Sounds like this is something you can help with. If you care, open an issue.
The style of programming does work for general purpose computing, but their requirements enable a significant % of “orders of magnitude faster than postgress”.
There's plenty of optimisations postgres and friends leave on the table. Like, the postgres client driver could precompile queries and do query planning on behalf of the database. It would introduce some complexity, because the database would need to send information about the schema and layout at startup (and any time it changed). But that would remove a lot of unnecessary, repeated makework from the database process itself. Application servers are much easier to scale than database servers. And application servers could much more easily cache the query plan.
Weirdly, I think part of the problem is economic. I think there's a lot of very smart people around with the skills to dramatically improve the performance of databases like postgresql. Across the whole economy, it would be way cheaper to pay them to optimize the code than needing companies everywhere to rent and run additional database servers. But it might not be worth it for any individual company to fund the work themselves. Without coordination (ie, opensource funding), there's not enough money to hire performance engineers, and the work just doesn't happen.
SerenityOS might be exactly what you're looking for. Join the community and make some apps, it's great (both the community and the OS/dev experience)!
If you're interested in that, you should definitely check out Serenity OS!
They're full KDE installs, and openSUSE 10.2 wasn't a lightweight distribution in its day. But now, even running in VMs, UI and network response are noticeablly snappy, and are sparing of resources by modern standards.
It’s written in Zig, not C. But that style of programming is still available to us if we want it. Even in more modern languages.
Honestly I’m really tempted to try to throw together a 90s style fantasy desktop environment and widget library and make some apps for it. There’s something about that era of computing that feels great.