On Monday, 23 April 2018 at 14:38:44 UTC, TheGag96 wrote:
That's definitely what I'm trying to avoid... I feel those
kinds of interfaces are 99% of the time mega bloated for what
they are. Discord is the only one that seemed big enough for
the britches of an entire browser instance. Absolutely not a
fan of Electron and the like.
I have never tried dwt! I should give that a shot. And I was
trying gtkd once, and I should probably try again. Back then, I
had to compile with --build=plain due to some weird linker
issues.
The advantage of using web technologies for UI:
- high re-usability: use the same or similar layout+functionality
for desktop, Android/iPhone apps and web based UIs.
- freedom as to layout and theming with CSS (highly customizable
for users too)
- cross platform: no need to deploy libs (e.g. Gtk on Mac and
Windows)
- maintenance: older JS code / CSS will still be ok in _most_
cases, whereas Gtk and other frameworks introduce depractaions
and breaking changes so that you have to a) rewrite parts of your
code and b) maintain older (outdated) versions of the program
until you can be sure that the older libs are no longer used /
distributed
- distribution: While users don't care about your maintenance
costs, they do care about having an app available on their smart
phones/desktops/online. So multiply various versions of say a Gtk
app by platform (_at least_ you have to maintain 2Gtk*3Platform =
6 apps). Users hate being told that it only works on Linux
desktop. Thus, web technologies can be a real gain.
- progress: web technologies have made huge progress JS and CSS
are much better now. Layout and js engines are much smarter as
well. So you benefit from this and get it more or less for free
on every platform.
