Lazarus/Free Pascal, I've run the IDE on a Raspberry Pi Zero W, it wasn't anywhere near as fast as I'm used to on a PC, but it got the job done. It makes small compact efficient GUI and command line applications.

Yup. I've tested it for sizes of the generated binaries, versus C and Go, for a hello world program. C was smallest, next FP, last Go. Both C and FP were under 50 KB, IIRC. Go, much more, in the 1 MB range, IIRC.

I have also written a few small CLI and GUI utilities in FP and Lazarus respectively, and it was mostly a breeze. Had fun.

If you have Delphi or VB experience, it is very similar, conceptually, so fairly easy to pick up.

This is because Go bundles a big runtime in every binary.

Is there a way to not do that?

You can also write allocation free Go, by computing everything on the stack. (Use pprof tool to analyze your code's allocations)

If you want smaller binaries without a runtime or GC bundled, you can try out tinygo [1]

[1] https://github.com/tinygo-org/tinygo

I think HTML, CSS, and JS could be the answer here.

However it relies on two important things:

1. Using something which uses the OS's built in browser (rather than something like Electron).

2. Keeping your JS very lightweight.

This was shared a few days ago, combined with py2app could be a winner:

https://github.com/r0x0r/pywebview

Personally I'd like to use github.com/webview/webview because they have bindings for a lot of languages (including golang) and use WebkitGTK behind the scenes on e.g. Linux distros.

With go you can embed all your assets and serve them on a local network port where the webview points to, which makes this combination ideal for fullscreen/kiosk like applications on older machines.

I am currently also trying out to build an opinionated UI library where I want to be able to reuse the defined structs on the client side (using web assembly), which would make interaction between clients and servers much easier. Not sure if I'm gonna be happy with it this way, but a man can only dream!

>Something that when the rest of someone's computer is slowing down, this can stay responsive.

Yeah so without having to overwrite some very deep OS settings, which will likely raise some red flags for your app requiring administrator privilege to run, you aren't going to get this. If someone has a browser thats taking up most resources, its gonna throttle everything.

There is generally very little reason to write anything but web apps these days for things that don't need to touch specific hardware. If you stick to as much native js/css/html as possible (i.e avoid large libraries), it will load blazingly fast and use way less resources then web apps that are considered fast.

Good point. I would prefer to write in HTML/JS. Vanilla JS is probably the way to go.

I think modern frameworks are so bad at perf because they assume people just have so much compute available and are focusing on one app at a time.

Give https://sciter.com/ a try. It's fast and small.

If you want the fastest cross-platform native app. Build a native app for each platform and have the design teams review each other's work so everyone stays roughly on the same page.

You're not going to hit your responsiveness goals otherwise. And it's not going to feel native otherwise (if anyone actually cares about that anymore, I dunno)

When I said "stack/strategy", the _strategy_ part implied this build-for-each-platform approach.

The question still remains then of which to use for each platform.

On macOS there is Cocoa (Swift or ObjC(++) or pure CPP) and Swift UI.

On Windows there is .NET C# or CPP and a bunch of other stuff.

Any thoughts?

Andy Brice, UK, has quite a successful product, PerfectTablePlan, written in C++ and Qt, and deployed on Windows and Mac, IIRC. His blog, successfulsoftware.net has some posts about why he chose it, and many other interesting posts about the desktop app product business, both the tech and marketing sides.

He also has guest posts sometimes about/by other successful desktop software product creators. One of them was about Beyond Compare, a GUI file comparison tool, written in Delphi, IIRC.

I have read many of his blog posts, and they are quite interesting and informative.

For macOS, native historically (OS X onwards) means Cocoa and Objective-C. Swift and Swift UI are the new kids on the block. I haven't dabbled with them much, but my two cents is Swift is a lot more complicated than Obj-C and Swift UI is less mature than Cocoa. But as I said, that's just my two cents. Your mileage may very.

For Windows, Microsoft has a history of releasing a new UI technology and then deprecating it. Their latest toolkit is WinUI 3. Given Microsofts dedication to backwards compatibility I think you could pick any of their toolkits, even the WinAPI. I should mention that WinUI 3 is an oddball because Microsoft is not shipping it with the OS, but rather vendors (you) must ship the toolkit with your app.

For Linux, the two most popular UI toolkits are GTK and Qt. But in truth Linux is just a kernel and it is the distro that decides what toolkit is "native". Maybe consider which distro(s) you'll target rather than treating Linux as a monolith.

For Mac, I'm not super in touch, but I get the impression Apple is all in on Swift UI, and their developer support model is clear: use old tech at your peril, it may not be supported in the next version. So I would use Swift UI.

For Windows, I think it goes the other way. Microsoft is always coming around with a new UI model that's half-ass and will be dead next year. Use the old ways: MFC will never die.

Apple Nuke their entire developer ecosystem from orbit every few years. Using a cross-platform UI like Qt insulates you from this to an extent. But the downside is that you never get it to look quite 100% native and you may not have easy access to the latest bells and whistles from Apple.

Microsoft can't seem to make up their mind on what UI platform people should be using. It's a mess. But they generally do support old platform, unlike Apple. I gag at thought of writing MFC code in 2024. But each to their own.

>I gag at thought of writing MFC code in 2024.

In any year. Could never grok it, when it was newish, what with its crazy opaque AFX macros, although I could somewhat easily understand Win 32 C programming (Petzold book etc.), even though that was lower level, and I was new to event-driven GUI programming then.

The Win32 API is also seriously ugly. All those struct parameters, mostly full of zeros, and the hungarian notation. I know it is something from an earlier time and can't be changed without breaking everything, but it was hideous even by the standards of the day.

Yes, it was. Delphi, a few years later, was a lot better ...

I've heard a lot of horror stories with Swift UI.

I think it's crazy that it's closed source too. It's a big black box which makes debugging hard. Plus its the kind of framework that does a lot of magic stuff where you scratch your head wondering what is going on.

I wouldn’t say I’ve had horror stories just minor gripes and frustrations. You can mix and match AppKit and UIKit with SwiftUI. So there is always an escape hatch.

SwiftUI is insanely productive when it comes to building mostly simple list and form applications.

I highly recommend that you try it, you can always build a component or large sections using UIKit if you run into issues.

At Ditto almost all of our enterprise customers use SwiftUI over UIKit because SwiftUI is so productive for the vast majority of use cases. Does it have parity with UIKit? No… but it’s never been a dealbreaker for us.

Yeh horror story was probably too strong a word. I need to try it.

I've not tried wxWidgets (C++), but I've written a few small GUI apps in wxPython. It is good. Only built them on Windows, though.

Qt is to PyQt and PySide as wxWidgets is to wxPython, roughly.

Check FLTK (Fast Light Tool Kit) too (C++).

Linux/Windows/MacOS: https://github.com/libui-ng/libui-ng

Alternatively there's also ImGui: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui

Wow 55K GitHub stars. This is like some record.