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Comment on React Desktop – React UI Components for OS X El Capitan and Windows 10parent

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Because working with things like GTK and QT is horrible compared to working with HTML/JS/CSS, for anything other than trivial things.

That said, it'd be cool to have native code generation from this though.

Have you used Qt and QML? For me it's much more productive and straightforward than html/js/css. Delarative legible ui with built in dataflow/reactive properties. Performs straight out of the box without having figure out how to work with the mechanisms buried in this hugely complex and opaque machine called a browser. In fact its a relief to work with it. Could you say where you think its so 'horrible'.

Agreed. Assuming they took this to its full potential, and created native, cross-platform, desktop widgets for React, what they'd end up with would look startingly similar to QML, except without the easy C++ interop.

I'm a fan of React, but I have no desire to use it outside of the web, and maybe mobile (still on the fence there). For desktop, we have QT, which is truly an awesome native widget toolkit, with many thousands of man-years work in it, excellent cross-platform desktop coverage, along with pretty good accessibility standards.

Do you know of any modern OS X apps written with Qt that have a native look and feel that, in particular, take advantage of Core Animation for UI transitions?

All the Qt apps I have touched (Google Earth comes to mind) have neither looked nor felt native on OS X, much like Swing and SWT apps don't at all feel native. Whereas all the best apps are written in native Cocoa.

Although I've never had to start from scratch, the Qt projects I've maintained have been prone to crashing.

Maybe the Qt apps have legitimate bugs but the fact is that native environments like Objective-C, and most likely this JavaScript environment, would both handle those issues very cleanly compared to Qt.

You clearly never programmed in Qt.

Did you mean the other way around?

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