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Ask HN: Desktop App Toolkits 2023

by foooobaba on 2/16/23, 2:38 PM with 1 comments

I’m building some tools and want a nice UI desktop application. I am not planning to make it web based or mobile, all though it might be nice to have that all other things equal.

I’m familiar with JS and web stacks, but last couple of years have been mostly using Java/Kotlin and python. I’m open to using something like Go, Dart, Swift, Typescript ect, but I don’t really want to use C++/rust due to learning curve. I need it to be cross platform ideally. I also prefer a statically typed language over dynamic. Going to be doing a lot of data visualization (graphs and interactive plots, image/video/rendering, tables, maps), some ML and formal verification.

So it looks like the options I’ve seen would probably be JavaFX, Electron, ReactNative, Flutter.

I’ve played around with JavaFX and it seems okay, some quirks but good for most part. Electron (w/TypeScript) also looks to be pretty good. I looked into Flutter and it seems to be not quite mature for desktop yet, at least from what I could find.

Curious what other people think would be good for 2023

  • by rlawson on 2/17/23, 12:40 AM

    I went down this rabbit hole. For me anyway, Swing was the easiest to bang out a quick UI (great UI builders, stable). But if you want to have others contribute to it or help you with it then Electron is probably the way to go (even with all the memory usage, etc). Flutter seems almost there but not quite yet on desktop.