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Ask HN: Best resources for learning desktop software development?

by alexliu518 on 7/11/24, 7:14 AM with 16 comments

• by chrisldgk on 7/11/24, 10:27 AM

  I’ll bandwagon off the other comment to ask which platform(s) you’re interested in.

  There’s a way to make native apps for each platform using Swift and XCode on macOS, C#/C++ and WPF (and whatever other ways of rendering desktop apps ms invented this year) for windows and multiple ways to do it for Linux.

  There’s also cross-platform toolkits like Flutter (before google currently trying to kill that) and the liked by developers and hated by consumers electron (and its newer, much lighter, rust-based alternative Tauri), which lets you write low-level code for the system API stuff and HTML, CSS and JS for your frontend. Cross-platform apps have a tendency to feel more janky - though they don’t always do - however it lets you write a single codebase for multiple platforms if that’s what you need.

  Another question - what’s your current skill-level as a developer? Have you built other kinds of software before or is this your entry into the field? That would partly impact what kind of material might be good for learning for you and which kind of framework you’d be comfortable with using.

• by mikewarot on 7/11/24, 1:33 PM

  Lazarus [1] is an open source Pascal based IDE that's cross platform. I even ran it on a Raspberry Pi Zero-W!

  The only downside is the documentation, which really needs an upgrade.

  [1] https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

• by written-beyond on 7/11/24, 12:27 PM

  Honestly, you'll get a lot of varying advice on this topic. Everything from embedded browser solutions to fully native ones.

  Just start building with flutter, it's the best maintained platform that's the easiest to reason around. Everything follows a well defined workflow, you won't spend 30 days just learning the variety of configurations people keep for getting each different platform running.

  If you go native you'll spend so much time deciding on platforms, build tools, packaging, etc.

  It's better if you just start building and when you find deficiencies in Flutter you know what you search for in other platforms. You can move to them then.

• by bn-l on 7/12/24, 10:09 PM

  I tried Tauri recently. I don’t recommend it. The current release, v1, is still a beta really with terrible documentation, and is not actively being worked on because the devs have moved on to v2 (in pre release).

  They have an active discord which is good. But it’s painful to go through the chats trying to hunt down an issue. I wasted hours and hours just there.

  I very strongly recommend electron. Yes the bundle size is larger but you will save so much time and effort that it’s worth it imo.

• by jitl on 7/11/24, 1:00 PM

  SwiftUI makes it super easy to get started on macOS. You can have an app editing a custom document format set up in an hour just following the documentation - as long as you don’t care exactly how it works since SwiftUI gives less control.

  I think generally Apple’s tutorial content when available is pretty good, making Mac apps is vastly easier today than it was in 2018, and if you’re a React developer a lot of the way of thinking carries over.

• by zkirill on 7/13/24, 4:55 AM

  Check out Tcl/Tk. It is cross-platform, simple, stable, has a long history, and runs blazing fast.

• by spaceheater on 7/11/24, 12:24 PM

  Are you rich? Because you will have 1000 more career options developing server/javascript, heck, even mobile apps.

• by Am4TIfIsER0ppos on 7/11/24, 9:20 AM

  On what platform? Which toolkit? The only good one is win32. Microsoft's online documentation used to be okay through MSDN but they've probably ruined it.