Looks really good! At first glance, this seems like probably the best Electron alternative I've seen posted on HN.
Apart from the consistent GUI layer, I think an underrated reason that many teams stick with Electron is the mature tooling for cross-platform builds and upgrades. It's pretty painful to DIY.
It looks like NodeGUI doesn't currently support cross-compilation--is that something that's on the roadmap? How about upgrade/auto-upgrade tooling? Code signing?
Strongly agree. Hello World apps are great but it would be even better to see a Hello World tutorial that can actually be distributed to customers. You probably also need auto-update, native installers, code signing (notarization on Mac) and the ability to build native modules cross-platform.
Sure, would be great if everything had everything we need at creation. But this is first a Show HN from a user here and secondly open source software, so I think you need to adjust your expectations a bit.
Agree with your final part, very exciting and gonna be interesting to see where nodegui goes, especially security wise.
This is awesome. Props to the authors. My comment was not meant to knock on this project. I'm just pointing out that people should consider distribution if they want to use a tool like this. Putting a desktop app in front of customers is not yet as easy as it is on the web but I'm working on making it better [1].
End-users are still more familiar with a download link on a website for a exe/dmg installer on desktop.
You also need to need to redo your subscription/payments to support the stores and give a percentage of your revenue to Apple/Microsoft. On mobile you have no option but on desktop it's hard to justify giving up so much of your profit margin when there's a popular alternative.
Flutter isn't a good Electron alternative? Flutter 2.0 just came out with desktop support for osx, windows and linux and will be the main GUI framework for Linux.
Not yet. Or rather, I would say you can use it for simple stuff, like Etcher then it is a reasonable choice. But you wouldn't want to use it for something like Slack yet. Some basic stuff like ctrl-Z in text fields does not work yet. Doing normal desktop things like menus and file dialogs will be a pain.
That said, I am writing a Git desktop client in Flutter and I like it. But I don't expect to finish it for many years so hopefully by then they'll have ironed everything out.
Apart from the consistent GUI layer, I think an underrated reason that many teams stick with Electron is the mature tooling for cross-platform builds and upgrades. It's pretty painful to DIY.
It looks like NodeGUI doesn't currently support cross-compilation--is that something that's on the roadmap? How about upgrade/auto-upgrade tooling? Code signing?