[jollyllama]

The problem with desktop is the stack isn't stable enough; constant updates and upgrades threaten to break all of your underlying dependencies. Server backend is the most stable stack, and that's one of the real reasons it's used so predominantly.

[cestith]

It's also a real pain to do cross-platform correctly without some abstraction layer like Qt, gtk, Wx, Tk, SDL, OpenGL, Vulkan, or something. Do you really want to write a Metal app, an MVC app, an X app, a Wayland app, and then still be asked to make a web version of it for people on the go? Look at all the work put into Wine and Proton to get Windows games - perhaps the ultimate everyday example of optimized native code - to run on Linux.

There are languages, UI tookits, cross-compiler sets, and RADs that make this easier. Qt, gtk, Wx, Tk, SDL, FLTK, and such happen to be among them. So are Flutter, Delphi (same code and RAD project on Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, and Android), FreePascal/Lazarus (not identical to Delphi but a pretty close F/OSS alternative built around the same language and concepts), Xamarin, React Native, NativeScript, Felgo, Roslyn, GLBasic, BlitzMax, PureBasic, QB64 with Inform, Gecko2D, FireMonkey, JUCE, IMCROSS, Haxe, Webassembly, the JVM, CLR/.net Core/CIL, Scala, C#, F#, Clojure, ClojureCLR, Component Pascal, IronPython, IronScheme, PowerShell, Kotlin, Groovy, jgo, Visual COBOL (yes, really - it targets JVM), JavaScript, Raku, NetRexx, JRuby, Yeti, Fantom, JR, Pizza, and I'm sure many other tools wouldn't even exist if developing single-source applications for multiple platforms was easy with just a C or C++ compiler.

[jollyllama]

100%

[msh]

Ah, that cant be right. Maybe for some platforms/stacks, but a windows desktop stack using somewhat standard tools will be backwards compatible for ages.

I have seen several companies using ancient windows apps for day to day work without issues. Personally I still sometimes use a somewhat complex GUI app that I last compiled around 2002-2003 with borland c++ builder without issues.

[jollyllama]

Really? These don't require any updates to run on Windows 10, etc? If that's true, why are there still industrial and military users running Windows XP?

[msh]

No updates at all. On one of the screens the buttons look a little bit off with modern windows themes but perfectly functional.

This will ofc not be true for all applications, I am certain somethings break, esp if they depend on hardware drivers.

If you check the blog "the old new thing" you can read about the crazy lenghts microsoft goes to for keeping backward compability.

[jollyllama]

Interesting. Thanks for the info.