[_gabe_]

I see this all the time, and I honestly do not get it. As someone that has ported a game written in C++ for Windows to Linux... its not that hard. It took me 2 days, about 4 hours of work total, and most of the ports I had to make were because I'm an obstinate developer and didn't use the std lib functions that would handle the OS wrapping for me.

Now, I've never ported an app to mobile, and that may be entirely different. However, and this may be an unpopular opinion, I don't want developers building an app that's meant to be used on a mobile device and a desktop. They're 2 separate ways of using a computer and they should be treated as such.

When I think of desktop apps like Photoshop, Outlook, Word, Chrome, and Da Vinci Resolve, they all look and behave very differently than their mobile counterparts (if they have one). If you want to develop for mobile and desktop, then you need to invest the time to make it a good experience on both. I hate desktop apps that have been mobile-ified to support mobile-first design. Design a proper UI and UX for the platform you're targeting. Otherwise don't bother "supporting" a platform you never test, intend to test, or design specifically for.

[LASR]

> ported a game

Most of the immediate pain with native to native ports is shift between UI frameworks. This always requires a huge investment to do correctly.

Not sure about your specific game, but if you're using an engine or handling widget rendering yourself, you won't feel this pain.

Simply changing your compiler target is easy. This is not what people are complaining about obviously.

[_gabe_]

> Not sure about your specific game, but if you're using an engine or handling widget rendering yourself, you won't feel this pain.

Out of all the apps that I listed, I don't believe any of them use native desktop widgets/controls/ui frameworks, except the Microsoft products. And even then, the Microsoft products are definitely using customized widgets which means they're writing a lot of custom rendering code anyways.

Edit: I'd also like to add that the original comment said that electron is portable, implying that portability is a tremendous feat. This is what I'm arguing against. Sure if you wrote your entire app in WPF, that's going to be next to impossible to port. But if you want to make a cross platform app, then it's not difficult to use a framework like QT to have a native cross platform app as opposed to embedding an entire browser runtime to get a portable app. This false dichotomy is what I don't get. It's not 2000 anymore, there's no reason portability has to be treated as some boogeyman that can only be solved by shipping extremely bloated software for a native cross platform app.

Also, here's a big list of C++ GUI libraries if QT doesn't float your boat https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/babfl5/a_pretty_big_li...

[mkoubaa]

Porting a large-scale windows desktop app to linux takes engineer years.

[anthk]

Not with QT and C++.