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by PaulDavisThe1st 1745 days ago
Electron leverages web-style development, which Qt (or GTK or FLTK, or JUCE, or wxwidgets, or libui ... etc) does not manage to do in any real sense.

If your dev team thinks in web-like terms, Electron is a more comfortable place to be. Better? I'd agree with you that it's probably not.

1 comments

"Better? I'd agree with you that it's probably not. "

Not really disagreeing, but "Better" is just constrained by the real ressources at hand. You have a team, specialised in making plattform independent QT apps? Sure, that is what you do. But chances are you don't, so you just target the web as web devs are plenty around.

"Academic" metrics of what is theoretically more preferable as a plattform and should be considered "better" are usually not very helpful to actually build things.

There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing going on here, though. As a close-by comment noted, there are signs of a convergence of thinking towards "cross-platform means Electron", when this is not actually the case (or is not required to be the case).

To the extent that this is true, it acts as disincentive for people wanting to pursue non-web-dev pathways in their careers, which then further limits the availability of such developers, which then further "confirms" the "cross platform is Electron" idea.

Developing with Qt is (I am told [0]) not much harder than typical web equivalents, but it is different. The result is generally more performant, both in terms of UI and also data handling/computation.

[0] I personally work with GTK, not Qt; Qt goes much further with hand-holding developer helpers than GTK does.