[red_admiral]

Back when Java had just introduced Swing to supplement/complement AWT, I remember you had a set of components (that you could even style in different ways with themes), a fairly object-oriented approach, and with the open-source MiG layout manager (that still exists today) a powerful way of laying out forms with constraints to adapt to changing screen/window/font sizes. I feel like UI framework progress from Windows 3.1 to Swing+MiG was much greater than anything I've seen since.

[josephg]

I feel that way about the old Interface Builder for macos, back in the Xcode 3.x days. VB6 was pretty good too.

[red_admiral]

Yeah, the interface builders back then are also unsurpassed to this day. Much as I have my issues with VB as a language, the way you could build a GUI with a GUI was amazing. Better still, it worked back on school computers that of course didn't have any "programming" tools, but did come with MS office and the full VB "experience" installed for some reason.

[Khelavaster]

Visual Studio's wpf editor and Avalonia are beyond vb6 interface builders!

[markus_zhang]

Just curious, what is preventing people from creating something similar to VB6 and Delphi in modern days? Different underlying frameworks? But I'm sure VB6 still sort of works on Windows 10 (VBA).

[josephg]

The big problem is that nobody wants yet another platform-specific UI framework. Even Microsoft is using electron (or something like it) to build Microsoft Teams.

If you build a cross-platform UI framework, it'll probably end up looking a bit ugly and custom on every platform (eg Java Swing). Making a cross-platform UI toolkit that looks native everywhere is an insane amount of work, because different platforms have very different UI toolkits, with different built-in components and different platform conventions. This problem becomes 10x harder if you want to make it work on mobile as well.

Some people try anyway - and bless their cotton socks. But electron (and arguably Qt) are the closest we've got. And even then, most electron apps seem to be full of custom components.

[markus_zhang]

Thanks, that makes sense. Where can I find a Windows specific (or Linux specific)? I actually don't care about cross-platform. Desktop is dominated by Windows anyway.

QT is not bad and I used it for a small project. But it follows native so I'm not sure how to go back to native Win2000 style.

[mike_hearn]

That's not really the cause. As you say, Electron apps don't look native either. The issues are elsewhere.

[dormento]

In theory, nothing will stop you. In practice, nothing stopped GAMBAS (https://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html), which can do a lot of what VB did.

Problem is, the multitude of platforms, screen sizes, capability sets etc. that we must support in practice make a very compelling case for a unified runtime, which ended up being the current web tech turducken clusterfuck we have today.

If the CPUs were slower, hovewer... one can only wish.

[mike_hearn]

Depends what you mean by "similar to VB6/Delphi".

The VB6/Delphi era (called at the time RAD for Rapid Application Development) was oriented around proprietary UI and component frameworks. They were planned out a long way in advance and solved a lot of problems up front, but, they were tied to Windows and then you had to buy the dev tools on top.

These days people usually want to write web apps if they aren't doing mobile. The web as a UI framework is basically evolved rather than designed. The features you need to support RAD don't exist. Moreover the web UI community would view them as bad practice!

RAD tools were typified by a few things:

1. A standard way to define components that is statically reflectable (so you can populate property and event editors), and get documentation on the fly, etc.

2. MVC: a standard way to separate code from layout.

3. Layout management that's integrated with the component hierarchy.

4. A standard toolbox of high quality, high effort components.

5. A marketplace for components (which means they need to be distributable in binary form).

The web has none of this and isn't going to any time soon. For example, there's no agreement on how components work. React has one or more different solutions, Web Components is a different one, Vue yet another. MVC has been abandoned: React doesn't know anything about that. Code and layout are intermingled together. JavaScript is dynamically typed, largely reflection-free language. You can't automatically work out what the props are for a React component short of parsing the source code. You can't easily distribute proprietary components either because there's no way to enforce licensing (so a lot of users wouldn't pay, in reality).

And then there's the components. Browsers don't provide good enough components out of the box, unlike Windows-oriented RAD tools, so devs have to invent their own. Then React makes things worse by conflating theming with the component library. The result is that every web app has its own unique set of widgets with its own unique set of limitations and bugs, very few of which ever reach a high quality level. Widget development is expensive, which is why RAD tooling centralized it and supported a marketplace, so devs could amortize out the cost of writing widgets across many projects. The whole React/Jetpack Compose approach basically spurns all of that and says if you want to change the way your app looks you get to redevelop the widgets from scratch. And everyone does want that, so there are floods of duplicated work that's open sourced and then abandoned, but nothing ever gets critical mass.

[markus_zhang]

Thanks. It looks complicated. I'm learning Windows desktop development and will take a look of QT first. I used it for a small project years ago and the experience was OK.

> 1. A standard way to define components that is statically reflectable (so you can populate property and event editors), and get documentation on the fly, etc.

This was what I really loved about Visual Basic back in the day. Everything is within clicks -- even with the legacy IDE it still feels slick.