Cross-platform GUI Toolkit Trainwreck, 2016 Edition
This is a great deep-dive into the GUI approaches taken by some nice cross-platform apps, but the author seems to have decided early on to ignore web technologies. It would have been nice to see an Adobe UI broken down, or Spotify, or Steam. (It&#x27;s not like their HTML&#x2F;JS-based UIs look any whackier than some of those audio production apps!)<p>If you have infinite time and need infinitely great performance, writing your own GUI framework on top of each platform&#x27;s native libraries is probably the way to go. But a huge team of people already built and bulletproofed one called Chromium. It&#x27;s icky in some ways and abstracted far from the native layer, and it&#x27;ll probably eat an extra 50ms when someone clicks a button, but you can build and ship a cross-platform app in less than three years. The docs are written, the bugs are known ones, and it&#x27;s easy to hire people who can help you. Just saying :-)<p>(full disclosure: I worked on an Electron-based mail client—definitely biased :-) )