Ask HN: How to do cross platform GUI?
Chromium is the best UI toolkit ever created. What exactly are the arguments against Electron?<p>It&#x27;s slow to render? Wrong, Electron (Chromium) renders faster than Qt. The Skia engine is optimized to an extent that these other toolkits cannot compete with. It even has a Vulkan backend now.<p>Single threaded? The render process is--you can use any native multithreaded code you want in another process.<p>Memory? It&#x27;s 70MB. That&#x27;s nothing nowadays. Modern OSes can page it in and out when the application is idling. A lot of these other toolkits are quite heavy too, especially JavaFX in my experience. Also what happens when you need a webview in one of these other toolkits? In Qt you get an embedded instance of Chromium[1] so not only do you have the 70MB of Chromium, you also have the Qt runtime (!).<p>The reason the Electron app you&#x27;re using is slow or hogs giants amount of memory is the Javascript code itself is slow. Yes, Slack is a slow monster, but it&#x27;s a giant codebase that does things that would be simply impossible in Qt, GTK, Swing and others. There&#x27;s a reason we never saw these types of apps when the only frameworks were Qt and others.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doc.qt.io&#x2F;qt-5&#x2F;qtwebengine-overview.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doc.qt.io&#x2F;qt-5&#x2F;qtwebengine-overview.html</a>